Once upon a Time, All Authoring was Straightforward
Web authoring is becoming an increasingly professionalised activity. What was once seen by programmers as being nothing more than a way of delivering information via a simple metalanguage has become an important platform for dynamic application development. We now see that there is a plethora of programmatic languages to make the Web more application like; browserless platforms, such as “Adobe AIR”, enable the mimicking of application interfaces and components while still using Web infrastructure; and, complex asynchronous communications and page updates have become the norm for industrial sites within the Alexa top 500. Indeed, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 draft specification implicitly acknowledge these changes by its focus on application programming. In this move to authoring professionalisation the key aspects of the Web which made its adoption so rapid have started to become neglected. Indeed, it is my contention that if development continues, by programmers—for programmers, unique aspects of the Web will become inaccessible to non-programmers and hobbyists, indeed the very people who made the Web of today. Certainly, it is not my intention to suggest that the professionalisation of Web authoring is negative across the board, indeed it is quite useful for a number of applications. However, it is my intention to suggest that by increasing development of programmer facing languages, the Web will begin to suffer from author inaccessibility.
I contest that in the near future it will not be possible for an untrained author, to simply read a small specification of the language, open a text editor and create a page; simply uploading the result to the Web. Even the graphical tools which are supposed to simplify this process, such as “Dreamweaver”, have become bloated with features to accommodate increasingly complicated interplay of Web languages. Of course, simplified applications, such as “RapidWeaver”, “iWeb”, and Google “Sites”, have been established to hide this complexity. However, the freedom to use the tools one wishes, in the way one wishes, is rapidly becoming eroded. The reliance on complex language means that the Web is becoming increasingly restricted for the “Everyman” who help bring it to prominence. Although I see an accessibility problem here, I am not suggesting a “Luddite” like, return to the old days of Web authoring, but instead, am calling for a simplified all-in-one Web language (either declarative or meta) which can be learnt in a short amount of time, by untrained programmers, who can use a text editor as the creation tool. I realise that the complexities will need in some degree to be hidden, but assert that this trade-off will neither be missed or required by the majority of authors working predominantly in the “long tail”.
I think your contention is a rather ahistorical: HTML was always by and for programmers and rather self-consciously so. The “untrained author” who can read a small *specification* (not a tutorial!) of a language, open a *text editor* (actually, not a trivial thing! most people don’t distinguish between word processors and text editors), and create “a page”, not to mention *uploading* it…that’s a very specialized audience. Indeed, that set is pretty close to programmers.
Also, why does the *spec* need to be for such authors? As long as the fragment of the language they need to learn is intelligible (or can be presented intelligibly), isn’t that sufficient?
I think to establish your point, you need to argue that the development trend harms *even that subset* we expect a larger population to understand and use.
Also, is it really correct to say that the development of HTML 5 *the language* is being done “by programmers for programmers”? From my observation (and their stated principles) users and authors have priority over implementors and spec writers. So, they may be failing to design a language that is generally usable, but the *are* trying to do so.
Hi there Bijan, thanks for your comments, and let me address some of them.
I don’t think I’m suffering from nostalgia here, indeed I think my view of history is pretty spot on. According to ‘Weaving the Web‘, TBL‘s intention was that all users should be able to both consume and create documentation directly. Indeed, this can be amply seen in the concept of Amaya, the W3C’s own Editor/Browser created because other browsers did not fulfil the creation aspects of the work. Indeed, the original editor browsers where just that – text only systems in which HTML was directly used. So the reality is that even ‘Information Management: A Proposal‘ relied on Ted Nelsons concept of the Docuverse enabling both consumption and creation.
It would seem that way wouldn’t it, and I agree this is technically correct. However, a simpler language spec has the happy ability to serve two masters – the naive user as well as the programming professional. But please do notice that I also think there is room for both – an expressive language focused at developers and a partner language to facilitate browser/creators who are typically naive users. I could go into a long diatribe here about how generation tools just don’t cut it, but I’ll restrain myself.
You may very well be right but from the original whatwg’s take on their reason for being, and their development of HTML5 I think we can see they are pretty focused on Web application development, an area I can’t see many naive users populating. I think there are plenty of good people developing HTML5 and that these have users on their mind, but I don’t think this is the driving rationale.
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Interesting article written by Stanislav Datskovskiy which relates to this one:
‘The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place.’
Full text: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568