Re: URL syntax was never intended for human consumption.

CobraBoy (tbyars@earthlink.net)
Tue, 2 Jul 1996 20:47:27 -0700

At 8:39 PM -0700 7/9/96, I Find Karma wrote:
>(What amazes me is how many different places I've now
>seen TimBL quoted as saying this... -- Adam :)
>
>BERNERS-LEE "STAGGERED" BY WHAT PEOPLE PUT UP WITH ON WEB
>World Wide Web developer Tim Berners-Lee never intended for ordinary folk to
>have to learn "http://" addresses and HTML formatting: "The original ideal
>was that anybody would very easily be able to write documents that could be
>connected through hypertext links. What has surprised me is the way people
>have been prepared to put up with manually encoding text. HTML was never
>supposed to be something that you would see -- it was intended to be
>something produced by an editor program. An analogy is with word
>processors. Computer users don't have to write in all kinds of codes to
>format their document with fonts, margins and so on. So it staggers me that
>people have actually put up with having to write HTML by hand. Similarly, I
>had not expected people to have to work out the hypertext links by looking
>up and typing in those long, complex codes for addressing. URL syntax was
>never intended for human consumption. It was intended for a machine."
>(Technology Review Jul 96 p32)

Yeah, and their doing it mostly on Win'95/3.1 machines. Sort of points out
the stupidity of man doesn't it?

The other Tim

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