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Robert Cailliau Talks With WikiNews
David Gerard writes "Wikipedia's citizen journalism sister site, Wikinews, has a long and interesting interview with Robert Cailliau, who worked with Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. 'I also remember a big resistance against PostScript, but what do we see now? PDF everywhere. Fortunately PDF is an open standard and it's fairly elegant, but it could have turned out much worse. SVG did not make it. Tim, who had a longer experience with the internet world, convinced me that the web could only survive if all the code was freely available for everyone who wanted to tinker with it. In 1992-1993 I then worked patiently for some 6 months with CERN's Legal Service to draft a document that put the source code into the public domain. This also implied working to convince the management, up to the Directors, of the need to do so. The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world.'"
"The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world."
A telling difference between Europe and the US. If it had been an American with this idea, the line would have read "The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that made me a multi-billionaire."
I beg to differ. Maybe if failing is the same as "Not ubiquitous on the web", but I find myself using SVG more and more. My vector work in Inkscape is saved in SVG. I've created dynamically generated SVG and rendered it to static images using Batik, to automatically generate hundreds of heading images for websites. Firefox now supports basic SVG. I wouldn't call it a failure as much as slow adoption...
.: Max Romantschuk
I miss those times... Bulletin Board software, messages from strangers, file areas, +++ATH0, first multiplayer games... ;)
ps. i wonder how fast would WWW catch on if it was invented today. threat of national security?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I can't help but think how much further along web applications would be if there were a programming language built-in from the start.
Yes, clearly the fact that SVG wasn't used in the manner foreseen indicates it has failed utterly.
I never randomly stumble upon SVGs while browsing the web. Yes, never.
Yes, you see PDF everywhere, but in virtually every case it's just another downloaded document format. Yes, you *can* view PDF in your browser, but you don't actually get any particular benefit from doing it that way no matter what Adobe seems to think: the fraction of PDFs that contain hyperlinks is negligible, and Adobe's embedded reader is balky and unreliable by comparison with the standalone one. And PDFs are inherently harder to read... the print-quality rendering and page orientation means that the text can not be adapted to the viewer. I recall one of Adobe's early ads for PDF, pushing Postscript as a web technology: they had the same page rendered in Postscript and HTML, and the HTML version had been rendered with deliberately odd browser settings... the Postscript version looked much nicer at first glance.
But even in a print ad, with magazine quality rendering, the Postscript version was completely unreadable and the HTML version was totally legible. As an ad for PDF it showed exactly why PDF isn't an appropriate web technology.
This is not, by the way, an inherent shortcoming of Postscript. It's possible to write Postscript code that does its own layout and adapts to the page dimensions and resolution, but no tools generate Postscript like that because the results don't look as good on paper. Perhaps if the Web had early support for Postscript in browsers it would be used that way by now, and used for scripting instead of Javascript, but that didn't happen.
Regardless of what might have been, PDF is not really relevant to the web today, except as a shining example of how not to create content.
Am I the only one who read his name to be: "Robert Cthulhu"?
Screenshots.
I think that depends on the creator - when it comes to long texts that needs a special layout, PDF can work great.
That's true, there's a lot of material that is not well adapted to HTML. At the moment that means creating a print-quality document and distributing it over the web, and PDF is a decent format for that.
In the context of "being a web page", though, PDF fails badly, and the vast majority of documents distributed in PDF (most of which are not academic papers, they're basically advertising) should be HTML.
DPS is a perfect example of what I was referring to, and NeWS is an even better on. Postscript integrated with web pages would have given us the capabilities AJAX provides years earlier, without the problems inherent in the way PDF is designed. PDF barely touches the surface of the capabilities of Postscript, even DPS ignores most of what it can do. Using Postscript as an interchange format or layout created by another program is like using HTML to display images by building tables of one-pixel cells set to appropriate colors... yes, you can do it, but other tools are better and you're throwing away most of the advantages of the language.
PDF wastes the abilities of Postscript, and does a bad job of presenting at least 90% of the pages distributed that way.
This is a very fascinating interview -- RTFA, the current discussions here do it disservice.
Gopher was around before WWW but to run a Gopher server you had to do some sort of deal with some US University or something of the kind. Where I worked, it was just too much effort to try to get our management to negotiate the necessary agreement to put up a Gopher server so after a few brief internal experiments we dumped Gopher. We could just download an run a web server on the same host that was serving FTP and provide more convenient access to the data that was already public.
If getting started on the web had involved asking the boss for money we would just not have done it. I have no idea how many other people were in a similar position, but for me having code that was free in both senses made all the difference.
I believe that if those who started it had set out to get rich from the web from the start it would have failed completely.
I think he's talking about <link rel="next/previous/contents"> in the head.
SeaMonkey has View > Show/Hide > Site Navigation Bar that shows buttons in the navigation for this. It's not in Firefox, though there's a Site navigation extension.
=S
For browser native support its sort of "anything but IE", the category that's also winning in browser marketshare ....
just to name one significant example
More examples on http://svg.startpagina.nl/
Not 2008, but 2009