Saturday, March 17, 2001
The Web: The Old and the New
Yesterday (I really wish I knew how to reset the date function manually in Blogger), I spent the whole work-day working on the revamped Digital View Web site. The development site for this is elsewhere, so if you are reading this soon after posting and check out the link, you will understand that I've got my work cut out for me. ;-)
While working on this Web site (and more specifically, the Remote Media part of the Web site, creating much new content from scratch), I decided to listen to Tim Berners-Lee's "Weaving the Web", courtesy of an audio tape borrowed from the Oakville Public Library. It was a real trip down memory lane for me, as he talked about the early Web technologies, taking me back my days when I worked at Delrina, especially when I worked on the documentation (and the relatively early Web site) for Delrina's Cyberjack Web browser. Berners-Lee talked about many of the original browsers that were out there, including Viola, Cello and the venerable Mosaic, all of which I looked at and played with extensively and compared features to the browser I was working on. This was at a time when there seemed to be a zillion Web browsers out there, long before the dominance of Netscape Navigator (and later, Microsoft's Internet Explorer). Nobody remembers Cyberjack anymore, as it was duly consigned to the virtual scrapheap of dud software programs. But I learned HTML in the process, and it's got me to where I am today -- still building Web sites. ;-)
Oh yeah, the book. I was surprised at how much Berners-Lee got into the "browser wars", when I was rather hoping he might get a bit more into the standards wars. Lots of god things in general to say about Netscape, but never did he talk about the extra tags they kept inserting into the new releases of their browsers. That and how the W3C made a hash out of launching the HTML 3.0 standard, a classic case of "what if you threw a party and no-one came?" since it was largely ignored by the Web-browser building community, who essentially had better things to do than conform to a decidedly stuffy and backwards-looking specification. I tuned out when he began talking about RDF, and I realized that there was interesting stuff there that I'll have to listen to again later.
All of this reminds me: I'd love to see if anyone from Delrina saved the original files for their Web site. I *think* I may have copied the files for the Cyberjack Web site somewhere, though I haven't been able to track them down as yet.
Oh yeah, and somewhere I've got some emails I had from Mr. Berners-Lee himself in a brief exchange I had when writing my first book on HTML. Ought to dig those out and look at them again (and perhaps post them here).
Yesterday (I really wish I knew how to reset the date function manually in Blogger), I spent the whole work-day working on the revamped Digital View Web site. The development site for this is elsewhere, so if you are reading this soon after posting and check out the link, you will understand that I've got my work cut out for me. ;-)
While working on this Web site (and more specifically, the Remote Media part of the Web site, creating much new content from scratch), I decided to listen to Tim Berners-Lee's "Weaving the Web", courtesy of an audio tape borrowed from the Oakville Public Library. It was a real trip down memory lane for me, as he talked about the early Web technologies, taking me back my days when I worked at Delrina, especially when I worked on the documentation (and the relatively early Web site) for Delrina's Cyberjack Web browser. Berners-Lee talked about many of the original browsers that were out there, including Viola, Cello and the venerable Mosaic, all of which I looked at and played with extensively and compared features to the browser I was working on. This was at a time when there seemed to be a zillion Web browsers out there, long before the dominance of Netscape Navigator (and later, Microsoft's Internet Explorer). Nobody remembers Cyberjack anymore, as it was duly consigned to the virtual scrapheap of dud software programs. But I learned HTML in the process, and it's got me to where I am today -- still building Web sites. ;-)
Oh yeah, the book. I was surprised at how much Berners-Lee got into the "browser wars", when I was rather hoping he might get a bit more into the standards wars. Lots of god things in general to say about Netscape, but never did he talk about the extra tags they kept inserting into the new releases of their browsers. That and how the W3C made a hash out of launching the HTML 3.0 standard, a classic case of "what if you threw a party and no-one came?" since it was largely ignored by the Web-browser building community, who essentially had better things to do than conform to a decidedly stuffy and backwards-looking specification. I tuned out when he began talking about RDF, and I realized that there was interesting stuff there that I'll have to listen to again later.
All of this reminds me: I'd love to see if anyone from Delrina saved the original files for their Web site. I *think* I may have copied the files for the Cyberjack Web site somewhere, though I haven't been able to track them down as yet.
Oh yeah, and somewhere I've got some emails I had from Mr. Berners-Lee himself in a brief exchange I had when writing my first book on HTML. Ought to dig those out and look at them again (and perhaps post them here).
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