“Fifteen years ago, the Web browser was invented on Christmas day. We look at the history of the browser, talk to its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and ponder how the software increasingly provokes users to define their own ways of consuming information online.” Berners-Lee: “A lot of people really want to have an arrangement to provide them with the software that is maintained, and to pay for that support. So, there’s a place for the commercial software makers. But the open-source community is absolutely essential for the development of the Web. That’s very important to maintain a healthy community.”
Correct, Open source *is* essential for the development of the Web. Thats apparent in how Apache run ~70% of the
internet’s web servers:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
Just because software is open source doesn’t mean that it
can’t be commercially maintained. A pretty good example
would be mysql being commercially maintained by mysql ab.
Exactly. What matters is the license and sustentability of the product. It can’t be left alone one year from now when the student (maintainer) graduates! That’s why companies/foundations are our best bets for open-source software.
Don’t forget:
sugar crm
red hat
So that’s why I made it an editor and I was really surprised when on platforms which didn’t have wizzywig editors, that people were prepared to go to the trouble of learning all the angle brackets and doing the html.
And a lot of people still do, so that was something that the user interface engineer in me was horrified to find that people would put up with such a terrible interface.
I personally feel I’m much better off writing the tags raw. I can change a single style and it reflect across an entire site, instead of nested font tags, and instead of multiple classes for the same thing made by dumb editors. Even NVu is miles from perfect in reducing redundency.
Forgot to add that not requiring a WYSIWYG editor probably helped acceptance of the standard and the growth of the web a huge amount.
A binary format that would require a WYSIWYG tool would save tons of bandwidth back in a time when you could see the letters appear one by one, but as a text format, HTML can be written on any computer without the need of any software other than any notepad like app, which even DOS has (edit). People can make their own editors with ease, people can create and edit HTML on any platform, any spec machine without having to rely on any one vendor or platform or minimum specification.
Part of Sir Tim’s reasons for HTML was the plethora of different software, computers and networks that prevented easy information exchange at the time.
Not everybody known how to code (X)HTML. My Grandma wants to be able to use bold and italics on her blog, and she sure doesn’t want to learn XHTML.
I know how to code in XHTML, but I don’t want to code it by hand for my blog either. We’re almost in 2006, don’t forget it.
Oh, and nVu sucks by the way.
<em>I know how to code in XHTML, but I don’t want to code it by hand for my blog either.</em>
Then you must not be very good at <em>marking up content</em> in XHTML (you don’t <em>code</em> in XHMTL), or you’d be more comfortable with writing the tags by hand, rather than depending on a tool to do it for you.
I have coded in XHTML strict, tableless CSS and JavaScript for 6 years now. Only done that, so if I’m not good at it, better do something else!
Yeah, except that XHTML has only been a recommendation for almost 6 years and no one supported it back then (IE still doesn’t).
who gives a shit about the browser or the OS, except the nerds themselves.
seeing as how ur on a site called “osnews” chances are u give a shit about the OS at least ^^
yeah, “you” really do. “you” should work on “your” spelling skills.
Some interesting stuff, especially where he mentions he envisioned the web a lot more interactive instead of publishing oriented. Originally anyone was supposed to be edit pages from the browser, assuming proper permissions for the user. Instead, every site has implemented it’s own authentication mechanisms, and wikis are considered revolutionary.
But he points out one important defect: it’s not straightforward to edit. You got to work around with tags, instead of for example selecting text and hitting ctrl+b (or pushing the ‘bold’ button). Drag and drop integration with the browser could be the next desktop revolution, if current webstandards would be able to handle various formats more transparently. For example: if you have a information site that’s maintained by a group of people; a person would be able to drag a graph to the browserscreen from his OpenOffice document, and get that graph embedded into a webpage seemlessly.
Perhaps, with environments like the Mezzo desktop, stuff like this will be possible soon. But the standard wouldn’t be a standard for the rest of us. That’s where we perhaps set out on the ‘wrong’ path for our webstandards, partly because of technical limitations we had earlier on.
Just a good reason to celerbrate thank you tim
Ahh the good old days. I can remember when Mosaic was THE browser. Then along came Netscape with the Pulsing N and blew mosiac out of the water. good times. Browsers have come a LONG way since the beginning.
I’m not so sure about that. Web browsers still diaplay the content given them. Bookmarks have been around since the earliest browsers and nothing much has changed in the browser scene since the basic inception of the brower itself 15 years ago.
What has come a LONG way is the content on the web. Dynamic content (Servers), Ads, shops, services and more.
Only with the extensibility of Firefox have we seen an actual evolution of the browser from a simple document-viewer to a more rich application. Having prettier graphics on screens and supporting more standards doesn’t change the fact that a browser is still Back / Forward / Reload / Stop / Home.
Whoever wrote this article has some very interesting ideas about the semantic web…. Page 3, last question: “How do browsers need to change in order to support the development of the ***Symantec*** Web as you see it?”
Happy new year, everyone!
danB