Posted by asdf on 11/06/07 05:28

"Ed Jensen" <ejensen@visi.com> wrote in message
news:13ivkjkh4a0ejcf@corp.supernews.com...
> dorayme <doraymeRidThis@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>> If untrained people are allowed to build and/or maintain complex
>> things, and the inevitable happens, then it may not be simply
>> because their tools are "wrong" but because the nature of the
>> whole practice is very complicated and unregulated. It may simply
>> be very hard to build good simple tools that everyone can use to
>> do nearly everything they want to do. All sorts of things can
>> stand in the way of this. In the case of website building,
>> browser manufacturers adherence to a common standard would make
>> things incredibly better. Even wsiwig tool makers would then be
>> able to fashion things that worked well.
>
> Gazing into my crystal ball, I'm going to guess a certain large
> software company will ensure "adherence to a common standard" will
> never happen, and will instead eventually push a different technology
> (conveniently enough, invented by them) instead.

Actually, probably not IMO. Are any of you folks old enough to remember
'Blackbird'?

It was going to be 'better than the web', apparently. It lasted about 6
months (from memory) before the 'very large company' pulled the plug and
recognised that the genie was well and truly out of the bottle in the form
of the www. They were playing around with this in the very early 90s I seem
to remember. I could be wrong about the dates, though.

In some respects they were right... it *was* better than the web, or at
least it looked prettier (at the time). You could, however, *only* look at
it on Windoze machines.

Ubiquity tends to lead to standards, methinks. By it's very dominiance www
technologies will probably prevail for the time being at least.

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