I 100% expect the general public to be able to write HTML.
You know what's unreasonable to expect from the general public, though? Knowing the rules to baseball. That shit's complicated.
There are many reasons why HTML is bad, but user friendliness is not one of them.
@enkiv2 I've got a bit of a different attitude.
1) I don't expect the general public to directly edit any plain text format. There's a widespread fear of such "coding".
2) I think there's something beautiful about HTML/CSS which gets lost under all the event handlers & <div> soup. And webdev education having entirely misplaced focus on tools like React rather than what browsers provide natively.
I don't disagree exactly, but:
1) the fear of coding is unfounded & spread by an apparatus that protects the elevated position of mediocre programmers at the cost of general code quality, so I refuse to treat it as anything but fundamentally stupid
2) HTML+CSS is better than the big bloated frameworks, but that's a very low bar; HTML is fine as a document format (albeit a little bloated), but trying to style it or auto-generate it immediately puts it way beyond the level where it's an appropriate technology. So, even though it's not the absolute worst, the world would be better if neither HTML nor CSS existed (or if only the parts of HTML that overlapped with features of standard markdown existed).
3) there's a beauty to twisted perversions that's much like the beauty of ill-considered optimization; I can appreciate the beauty of an ugly hack while also thinking it should never be used. basically all web-tech falls into this category for me.
@alcinnz
people are afraid of writing code in a text editor the same way they're afraid of great white sharks, and it's a toss up which fear has a greater negative environmental impact
Yeah. Just the html, body, b, i, ul, ol, li, table, th, tr, and td tags.
The a tag should not be included because it makes people think that html is compatible with hypertext systems, which it is not.
@enkiv2 @BillSeitz I'd include plenty more tags, in fact I'd say the more the merrier...
What I like about HTML/CSS is how readily they can adapt to alternative mediums within which to present the text! Braille, audio, various forms of visual, etc!
Without having the seperation between semantics & style you loose this versatility. Then again requiring JS also removes this versatility...
@enkiv2 @BillSeitz Also I have complex thoughts regarding CSS, so I'll drop that aspect.
Let me just say I"m sure Xanadu would've become as much a twisted perversion of itself just as much as the web has, if it had been the one to become popular. And I'm not all that sold that it was a better conception.
I like the ideals of the CSS Working Group even if I admit they've never really been realized. I hope to realize them myself, and am having some luck.
@alcinnz @enkiv2 @BillSeitz The thing I find interesting about CSS is how frustrating it has been to do things which are conceptually very simple, like 3 columns all the same height, or making text scale to fit a container. While a lot of things have been fixed with grid and flexbox, it took a long time to get there.
@alcinnz @enkiv2 @BillSeitz And TeX was the same. We eventually got to ConTeXt, and it became possible to do grid-based layouts without massive hackery, but again it took 18 years to get there. And as for PostScript, don't get me started.
I can't decide whether there's something fundamentally difficult about page layout, or whether the people tasked with implementing it on computers just do a terrible job every time.
@mathew @alcinnz @enkiv2 @BillSeitz I think text layout is just genuinely a difficult problem. You can place each word by hand with PostScript (or a compositing stick, or SVG, or position: relative) but is a lot of work and isn't responsive to page size. Once you start doing things automatically, sometimes inevitably the automatic procedure does the wrong thing. And by making it automatic you have made it harder to fix. You have an expressiveness problem.
