INS and DEL elements re-discovered and used for version control. HTML document's version
history kept within itself.
HTML pages as containing structure and storing their contents in separate files. Easier for everyone to deal with and splits up your page into logical pieces.
Update: I found a copy of the essay here but it appears to be a reprint with a different title, “Time To Liberate The Web”. Same content though, so it doesn't matter.
I found an essay by Ted Nelson titled “Way Out Of The Box”, and it's about limitations imposed by technical-minded people on everyone else. It's about the assumptions made when programs and computers are designed.
Here is a particularly good passage that tells us what we sacrifice when we force users to become distinct from programmers,
Suppose they gave you MTV, and in return took away your right to vote? Would you care? Some of us would. That's how I think of today's computer world, beginning with the Macintosh. The Macintosh gave us Fonts, pretty fonts to play with, and graphic arts tools that previously were out of reach, except in the most high-budget realms of advertising and coffeetable book production. Those fonts and graphic arts tools were a great gift.
But nobody seems to have noticed what the Macintosh took away.
It took away THE RIGHT TO PROGRAM.
If you bought an Apple II, you could begin programming it right out of the box. I have friends who bought the Apple II without knowing what programming was, and became professional programmers almost overnight. The system was clean and simple and allowed you to do graphics.
But the Macintosh (and now the Windows PC) are another story. And the story is simple: PROGRAMMING IS ONLY FOR OFFICIAL REGISTERED “DEVELOPERS”.
(Emphasis mine)
So I was studying my marketing textbook and I realized that Free Software has an awful reputation because of bad marketing. The software is, for the most part, technically sound, however the image of it is awful. This then reminded me of EventCal, the Python HTML calendar generator that I wrote a few years ago. I still get emails about it once in a while, even though I'm not actively maintaining.
So instead of studying, I created a quick checklist on what a Free Software website should have in order to be considered helpful by users. I won't post that list here just yet, because I want to write up a few other checklists and notes on marketing.
I've become interested in infographics, those fancy diagrams and charts and illustrations/visualizations of data that make them stick in your mind more easily. Why settle for an ugly chart when you can just adjust the fonts and colours a bit and get something sweeter looking.
