> Something I don't see anyone else saying: the World Wide Web's primary "language", HTML, being so incredibly un-powerful and reliant on browsers for new features, is an intentional, FOUNDATIONAL design principle, called the Principle of Least Power:
People have been fighting against this since the Web first hit the mainstream circa fifteen years ago now. First it was tables and single-pixel transparent GIFs, then it was a whole lot of Flash and Java and a few sites done pretty much entirely as JPEGs, then those people got their hands on CSS and Javascript, which is pretty much where we are now.
That got us quirks mode, tag soup, and "This website is best viewed with". OTOH, the semantic web never caught on, either, and a lot of great proposals surrounding microformats died due to nobody caring about them.
It's almost a law, really: The Web is never, and will never be, precisely what you want it to be. However, it will likely be good enough.
People have been fighting against this since the Web first hit the mainstream circa fifteen years ago now. First it was tables and single-pixel transparent GIFs, then it was a whole lot of Flash and Java and a few sites done pretty much entirely as JPEGs, then those people got their hands on CSS and Javascript, which is pretty much where we are now.
That got us quirks mode, tag soup, and "This website is best viewed with". OTOH, the semantic web never caught on, either, and a lot of great proposals surrounding microformats died due to nobody caring about them.
It's almost a law, really: The Web is never, and will never be, precisely what you want it to be. However, it will likely be good enough.