On 2/28/2012 5:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
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.
I am not saying it is particularly "good", just that it is "ok" and "not
completely horrible...".
it is, as are most things in life, generally adequate for what it does...
it could be better, and it could probably also be worse...
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.
IMO, this is more when one gets into the SOAP / WSDL area...
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.
I don't think email and the WWW are mutually exclusive, by any means.
yes, one probably needs email as well, as well as probably a small
mountain of other things, to make a viable end-user OS...
however, technically, many people do use email via webmail interfaces
and similar.
nevermind that many people use things like "Microsoft Outlook Web
Access" and similar.
so, it is at least conceivable that a future exists where people read
their email via webmail and access usenet almost entirely via Google
Groups and similar...
not that it would be necessarily a good thing though...
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