Re: HTML: woes

Damien R. Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Wed, 11 Mar 1998 12:18:43 -0800 (PST)


On Mar 11, 10:39am, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> Ouch, I thought I was retro since I read my mail in Emacs, but I stand
> corrected... :-)

I think "vi $MAIL" was too retro for me. Unless he .locks it first.

> somehow I think Vinge was right on the mark with his description of a
> galactic Usenet with headers fairly similar to ours; ancient, basic
> standards that everybody use but always try to circumvent.

And Sasha brought up smart software which can negotiate appropriate protocols
before it gets to you, also reflected in Vinge. But as this is a list
practically suckled on Vinge, let us not forget what else appeared in that
book: an award-winning dramatic presentation of the interesting times which
active content can bring you.

Microsoft is not the Blight, cheap attacks notwithstanding, but the prospect
of not knowing what my mailreader is up to is about as attractive as waiting
longer for a graphical mailreader to load so that it can display the author's
choice of font and color. Me, I have Netscape 3 set to override document
colors, although they forgot to catch <font> and table color codes.

> will have to make it a standard, and that is obviously tricky
> (remember MIME?).

Somewhere recently I saw a contrast of the IETF standards process --
implement, implement, debug, standardize -- and the W3C process --
standardize, implement, debug. It was suggested that IETF has a better
record. The philosophical relevance to us would be an analogy linking IETF to
evolutionary rationalism and W3C to constructionist rationalism.

-xx- GCU Twirlip of Greymist X-)

"However, one should also point out that lab mice are _very_ _very_
stupid, and are incaple of survival outside of the laboratory
environment where their biggest day to day problem is rediscovering that
today the food is on the left side of the cage."