On Jun 9, 2011, at 11:01 AM, Josh Gargus <[email protected]> wrote:
> Conceptually, yes. In practice, no, because the HTML/DOM render-target is > also the lingua franca that makes the Web searchable and mashupable. So I'd like to first point out that you're making a great point here, so I hope it isn't too odd that I'm about to try to tear it down. Devil's advocate? While the markup language has proven quite mashable/searchable, I think it's worth noting that just about *any* structured, broadly applied _convention_ will give you that; it could have been CSV, if SGML hadn't been tapped. One of the nicest things about markup has been free-to-cheap accessibility for blind folks... with most languages you can embed in a web page, this tends to go out the door quickly, and AJAX probably doesn't help either. If the browser was an operating system, I imagine we'd find a more traditional route to this kind of accessibility, which is about text-to-speech, and if you have the text, you should be able to search it too. Take a moment to imagine how different the world might be today if the convention had been e.g. s-exprs. How many linguistic context shifts do you think you'd need to build a web application in that world? While I love programming languages, when I have a deadline? bouncing back and forth between five or six languages probably hurts my productivity. Not to mention that we end up compensating in industry by hyperspecializing. I wish it was easier to hire people who just knew how to code, instead of having to qualify them as "backend vs. frontend." I mean seriously. It's like specializing in putting a patty that someone else cooked on a bun, in terms of personal empowerment. Factory work, factory thinking. I'm the button pusher and your job is to assemble the two parts that I send down the line every five seconds when I push the button. Patty, bun. I hoped Seaside might help a touch, and the backend guys all seem to really dig it (hey, now we can make web apps all by ourselves, without the burden of the wrangling boring markup-goop) but the frontend folks I've talked to (in-trench, not online) are hard pressed to have time to learn a whole new system. Since they build the part that the stakeholders actually see, I think they end up with more in the way of random asks from business folks, which have this way of making it clear over engineering managers, etc. There's also the problem wherein you have a whole bunch of people out there who've never seen anything else and don't have any context for why someone like me might be displeased with the current state of affairs. It'd be nice to be able to sort out how many of these problems are cognitive+technical versus cultural/social. The most interesting thing I've seen so far was when I was at a (now sold/defunct) company called Snapvine. We integrated telephony with social networking sites. Anyway, I spent more time looking at MySpace than I wanted to, and was stunned to discover: Kids with MySpace pages were learning HTML and CSS just to trick out and add something unique to their profiles, and didn't seem to relate what they were doing to software at all. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to smile or frown when that realization hit me. That's about when I started talking to people about HyperCard again, which is ultimately how I found my way to Squeak, and then this list. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
