Re: "People should not write HTML"

Joe English (jenglish@crl.com)
Mon, 12 Dec 1994 11:05:52 -0800


John C. Mallery <JCMa@wilson.ai.mit.edu> wrote:

> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 09:05 EST
> From: michaelj@relay.relay.com (Michael Johnson)
>
> >People should not be writing html; programs should.
>
> Excuse me? That's a load of hooey if I ever heard one.
> No WYSIWYG editors? Microsoft is coming.....

Yes, but just because GUI editors exist doesn't mean
that everyone should have to use them. Given a choice
between using vi on a Unix box and using anything from
Microsoft on a PC, I for one will stick with vi :-)

> [...] I've got my own abstractions so
> whatever level of empircism is wedged into the standards will never get in my
> way.

That's probably the best approach. I rarely use
HTML markup for any important data; it's better to use a
DTD that encodes information relevant to a particular
type of document and down-translate it to HTML for presentation.
That's what HTML is for, after all...

--Joe English

jenglish@crl.com