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)
[as seen in Educom...]