[Up: design lab] [Robot Wisdom home page]
I was considering doing an 'Infamous Villains' dossier [eg: Jakob Nielsen] on Tim Berners-Lee, but I don't think he quite deserves that-- he's responsible for many very serious problems of the Web, but his errors are simple geek-think. [eg: XML]
So instead I want to retrace the early history of HTML (etc) and see what mistakes were made when (not always first by TimBL).
I believe that Tim's web pages-- as well as all the other W3C pages-- show very, very poor usability, literally unreadable by the standards of someone like Edward Tufte. [extreme example]
From the earliest days, there was a failure to appreciate the esthetics of simplicity, and this has snowballed over the last ten years to our current, effectively unimplementable theoretic dead-end.
Pre-history of hypertext: my timeline; [multipage]; multi-author blurbs; SGML
TimBL: his own bio; his FAQ; schooling; Time's 3pg, onepage; nice intro
c1950: Tim's parents work on Ferranti Mark I computer [info]
TimBL's programming style: "Some of the earlier programs were too abstract and led to hopelessly undebuggable tangles." [cite]
1980-1994: narrative
1980: Tim's personal utility ENQUIRE [docs- page images] giant scans
inspired by million-selling 1856ff Victorian how-to handbook "Enquire Within Upon Everything" [etext] toc [Bibliofind]"the first version of Enquire allowed you to make links between files (on one file system) just as easily as between nodes within one file. (It stored many nodes in one database file)... the requirement was for 'external' links to be just as easy to make as 'internal' links. Which meant that links had to be one way."
'ENQUIRE' ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III
no-date: "At CERN, I was recruited by Peggie Rimer who taught me, among other things, how to write a standards document." [unspeakable, frankly-- W3C docs are literary gibberish]
1989-1995: detailed timeline; ditto?; rogues gallery
1989-1992: older timeline [many broken links that you can supposedly fix by cut-n-paste of URLs]
no-date: "The project I'd worked on just before starting WWW was a real-time remote procedure call, so that gave me some networking background." [cite] more
1989: March: TimBL's informal CERN proposal [HTMLized] [multi-formats] (focus on Enquire, no SGML, lots of semantic AI, prediction of images, video, speech) "generality and portability [should be] more important than... complex extra facilities"
[the AI-stuff should have been factored out as an experimental option for individual users, but TimBL is still trying to force it on the system from above]
Robert Cailliau: interview, memoir; his own bio; HyperCard fan; joins TimBL 1989/90 [his timeline] (SGML mentioned 1993?)
"I'm very adamant about this: I want to keep the structure separate from the presentation." [already confusing the issue: more]
1990? program: FIND [info] [toc] bug report 1991: H1-6 abuse
1990: May: 1989 proposal recirculated, approved in Sept
alternate names: "Alternatives I considered were 'Mine of information' ('MOI', c'est un peu egoiste) and 'The Information Mine ('TIM', even more egocentric!), and 'Information Mesh' (too like 'Mess' though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!)." [cite]
1990: 12Nov formal proposal for 'WorldWideWeb' (browser renamed 'Nexus'; infospace called 'World Wide Web' with spaces) [HTML] (includes keyword search, browsers for multiple platforms, servers negotiate formatting with browser, Usenet server, automatic notification of new postings, human HyperLibrarian overseeing semantics, nightly spidering)
[was the Usenet idea ever implemented? ie, a server that delivers newsgroups as HTML?]
about 'HTTP://': "I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like HTTP:/ /www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written HTTP:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out that www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too late now. It turned out the shorthand '//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz' is rarely used, and so we could dispense with the '//'." [cite]
1990: 25Dec? first cool site ever: CERN phonebook [cite]
1991: autumn? comp.infosystems.www newsgroup
1991: 28Oct: WWW-TALK archives
1991-1994: CERN's WWW-traffic grows by 10 each year [cite]
no-date: chose green for links? [cite] cf early screenshot; NeXT sourcecode; opened new window with every click, URLs hidden, could display scalable PostScript, stylesheets: "I would use three styles: one for projecting from the screen, one for printing, and one for actually doing the editing. No changes to the HTML files!", Cailliau: "this whole business of doing the HTML right was not really high priority" [cite]
history-stack was flat instead of tree [more]
line-mode browser (via telnet): "one journalist wrote 'The Web is a way of finding information by typing numbers.' as links were numbered on the page" [cite]
1992: WWW-TALK archives (Andreessen posts Nov92)
1992??? HTML 1.0 (?): ignore linebreaks; tags: TITLE, NEXTID, A-NAME-HREF-TYPE, ISINDEX, PLAINTEXT, LISTING, P, H1-H6, ADDRESS, HP1+, DL-DT-DD, UL-LI, MENU, DIR; entities: LT, GT, AMP
[many of the worst problems appear here all at once: H1-6 not defined relative to body text, A-NAME confused with A-HREF, and also maybe the insane P+P=P rule? (ie, empty paragraphs are ignored)insane but quickly fixed: highlighting using 'HP1' notation
missing already/still: extend anchor-name syntax to include arbitrary pattern-search-- index.html#pattern --or even the two-step, incremental-- index.html#name#pattern --as well as percentage-addressing-- index.html#36%#pattern --which means jump down 36% of the doc-length and then search for 'pattern' from there]
HTML 1.0 future: HEAD-BODY, DATE-CREATED-EXPIRES, EM-TT-CITE, BOLD-ITALIC, PRE, BLOCKQUOTE (?), OL, comments
BLOCKQUOTE and BOLD-ITALIC were right-headed, for once. 'CENTER' would have been good at this point, too. comment-syntax ended up choosing sgml-based gibberish.PRE: this was seen as a concession to an antique legacy-format instead of a potentially emailable lingua franca [more]. cf Cailliau: "Our idea was that the original document is on the Web. What's on the Web is not the result of a conversion from something else, but rather, it's what you start out with, it's how you think." [cite]
1992?? design issues [toc]: 'next' button? [details]; notification (email?); what's in a link; proto-URL (proto-UDI?)
privacy: CERN physicists start to balk at public accessibility [cite]
1992? software
1993-1995: WWW-TALK archives
1993: Feb: NCSA Mosaic for X by Marc Andreessen [interview] (first with inline images instead of separate window)
Cailliau: "I personally didn't want the images in line. It's a nuisance because you can't keep the image in view." [cite][the human-factors benefit here was huge though-- your eye went 'YES!']
1993: Aug: NCSA Mosaic for Mac and Windows
"There were people like Dan Connolly, who early on said, 'Hey, wait a bit, and let's make HTML a real SGML DTD'" [cite]
Dan Connolly his W3C page and bio (meets TimBL 1991) [pubs] (June 1992 post about MIME hypertext; Oct92 more; Jun92 on SGML "I claim credit for the use of MIME in HTTP, which turned out to be a mixed blessing."); [projects]
1993: 08Nov: HTML+ document
1994? HTML+ review: FIG-SRC-ALIGN-CAPTION, FORM-ACTION-INPUT-TEXTAREA, TABLE-BORDER-CAPTION-TR-TH-TD, nested lists, HR, BR, SUB, SUP
1994: June: TimBL already seriously out of touch: "I hardly spend any time browsing" [cite]
1994: Dec: W3C formed
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