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Michael Kay wrote:
> My first reaction was quite different but equally
> wrong. I thought he was totally naïve to imagine
> that he could get the world to agree on one
> standard for doing this stuff.
No. You weren't wrong. It was, I think, totally naïve to
imagine that people would standardize on a single standard. The fact
that it happened doesn't make it any less naïve. (But, the fact that
it was naïve shouldn’t detract from the value of what was done. Please
understand that I am not trying to take away from what TBL did.)
In my own work on Hypertext/HyperInformation back in the 80's,
I now know that I spent much too much time worrying about trying to
ensure that our system would work well with a wide variety of systems.
I, unlike TBL, *assumed* that introducing a new document format would
be a failure... This was in part because I was also responsible for
ALL-IN-1, which already supported a wide variety of word processors,
document formats, etc. and I assumed that a new tool wouldn't be
successful unless it supported all of the different ways of viewing
and encoding text, information, etc.
Frankly, TBL had the advantage of doing his work on the Unix
platform and on Unix where there simply wasn't the same variety of
entrenched formats, investment in competing formats, etc. as on other
platforms. Most Unix documents were simply 7-bit ASCII text and could
be easily pointed to by even the earliest web browsers (even though
they wouldn't contain out-bound links, you could at least display a
text document in the earliest web browsers). Unix didn't have much
commercial penetration and thus there weren't many "big bucks"
application developers who would have economic objections to a
standard growing in a way that compromised them. Thus, TBL's web was
birthed in a relatively "green field" environment and able to grow
some strength before it was unleashed into the less friendly world of
Windows, VMS, etc...
I am personally convinced that if TBL had released his first
versions on any other operating system, most of us would never have
heard about it. The commercial weakness of Unix may have been one of
the key reasons that TBL's web was successful.
Perhaps what needs to be said here is that assuming a single
standard could be achieved was less naïve on Unix than it would have
been elsewhere... Those of us who were on non-Unix platforms tended to
evaluate work like TBL's from within the value-systems and constraints
of the platforms on which we worked. TBL was working in a different
environment -- an environment with less variety in document formats
and fewer estalished commercial interests to fight him.
bob wyman
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