Re: experts

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 12:40 AM 3/28/01 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>At 08:39 PM 27/03/01 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> >  HTML, of course, was designed by
> >an amateur.
>
>On which planet?  TimBL had a lengthy and pretty good career
>as a software professional before he went to CERN, where he
>was a full-time employee working on electronic information
>dissemination among other things.  A bit of fact-checking
>please. -Tim

Hmm... you seem to have lost the context, and that 'amateur' is a good 
thing in this case.

Yes, Tim BL was definitely a software professional doing good work.

He didn't, however, really come from the field (hypertext) to which he made 
his substantial contribution.

A number of people, I think himself included, have pointed out that Tim 
BL's lack of baggage was a lot of what made it possible for him to create a 
distributed hypertext system which accepted things like 404 Not Found as a 
fact of life, and which only supported the tiniest possible amount of 
hypertext linking.

To me, that's a hell of an achievement.  But then, HyTime damn near put me 
off markup entirely.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books