RE: IT'S HTML, DUMMY!
RE: IT'S HTML, DUMMY!
Sent: 12/6/96; 11:52:19 AM
From: BVOLK@lightspan.com (BILL VOLK)
Today's Topic: I Love Lousy Standards! - or - What's really great about the WWW.
Overheard on a bus at Art Teco II, "isn't that World Wide Web standard just awful! It's based on ASCII! and it's too slow and it's hard to do anything neat.... etc. etc." Well, I think that's exactly what's great about it! Read on....
A bit of (optical) history. In 1986 a group of companies got together to standardize a new media platform called CD-ROM. What they came up with was a format known "High Sierra", named for the area where they met. This evolved into the ISO 9660 format used today. What this standardized was the directory and file layout. And that's basically was all that was standardized. Attempts to extend the standard to include media (pictures, audio, animation) and interactive failed. In some cases these attempts were centered around a hardware platform, for example Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I).
What didn't happen was a CD-ROM standard centered around file formats and portable client software. You run a "browser" on your particular hardware to access the standardized media. Sounds neat. This is known as a "software platform." CD-ROM XA attempted this, by taking some of the CD-I formats and applying it to a new format standard. Trouble was you needed to change your CD- ROM drive to make XA work. Back in the '80's that meant replacing a $1000 drive. Of course now all drives are XA compliant, but the audio and file formats are now for the most part ... history.
Why was it so hard to standardize a CD-ROM software platform? Many reasons. Certainly there was the battle of the platforms (CD-I et. al.). But beyond that is the attitude expressed on the bus. There's no way a software platform can compete with code crafted specifically for a particular hardware platform. That techie on the bus was right.
Of course it took until 1993 for any major CD-ROM market to happen. That year the sales of CD-ROM titles increased by over 2000%! Good time for Activision to release a decent CD-ROM adventure game. The market's bigger and a whole lot more crowded nowadays. And CD-ROM's are far from a "standard." Even now installing a multimedia CD-ROM has become the "some assembly required" of the new media business.
Before we get back to the web, a brief detour. In 1987 Apple released HyperCard. A software platform, but unfortunately with only one client (Macintosh). Still the HyperCard era (1987 to 1990 or so) was responsible IMHO for much of the innovation that enabled multimedia. Companies like Cyan (Myst) cut their teeth on HyperCard. Yes, there was a lot of trash, but there was also some exceptional software. I still miss Focal Point (a personal organizer).
HyperCard was accessible to non-programmers and bought people into the interactive world who were locked out before. Too bad it didn't run on the PC. Too bad it didn't support color when the Mac II and VGA PC's took off. Remember that folks.
So a graduate student takes a variant of an existing standard for text (SGML) and creates HTML and the WWW. An open software platform that runs on many systems (kinda o.k.). It explodes. Everyone and their pet cat seems to have a home page. I know that there are still problems. It's still a pain to get Internet access. Going thru a commercial system can be a pain, the commercial on-line services WWW browsers are best described as "adequate."
There's great stuff coming. Java for running more of the stuff on the client. VRML for 3D environments. I'm not happy that both of these items don't exist for my PowerMac, but I'm sure they will show up (remember HyperCard). The point is that the WWW and the HTML standard exist. The standards are public and don't belong to one company. They may not be optimal, but I'll take the non- optimal over the non-existing. The Web is chock full of schlock, but there's some gems out there. Fun to play with.
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