On 29/02/2012, at 10:29 AM, BGB wrote: > On 2/28/2012 2:30 PM, Alan Kay wrote: >> >> Yes, this is why the STEPS proposal was careful to avoid "the current day >> world". >> >> For example, one of the many current day standards that was dismissed >> immediately is the WWW (one could hardly imagine more of a mess). >> > > I don't think "the web" is entirely horrible: > HTTP basically works, and XML is "ok" IMO, and an XHTML variant could be ok.
Hypertext as a structure is not beautiful nor is it incredibly useful. Google exists because of how incredibly flawed the web is.... and if you look at their process for organising it, you start to find yourself laughing a lot. The general computing experience these days is an absolute shambles and completely crap. Computers are very very hard to use. Perhaps you don't see it - perhaps you're in the trees - you can't see the forest... but it's intensely bad. It's like someone crapped their pants and google came around and said hey you can wear gas masks if you like... when what we really need to do is clean up the crap and make sure there's a toilet nearby so that people don't crap their pants any more. > > granted, moving up from this, stuff quickly turns terrible (poorly designed, > and with many "shiny new technologies" which are almost absurdly bad). > > > practically though, the WWW is difficult to escape, as a system lacking > support for this is likely to be rejected outright. You mean like email? A system that doesn't have anything to do with the WWW per se that is used daily by millions upon millions of people? :P I disagree intensely. In exactly the same was that facebook was taken up because it was a slightly less crappy version of myspace, something better than the web would be taken up in a heartbeat if it was accessible and obviously better. You could, if you chose to, view this mailing group as a type of "living document" where you can peruse its contents through your email program... depending on what you see the web as being... maybe if you squint your eyes just the right way, you could envisage the web as simply being a means of sharing information to other humans... and this mailing group could simply be a different kind of web... I'd hardly say that email hasn't been a great success... in fact, I think email, even though it, too is fairly crappy, has been more of a success than the world wide web. Julian
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