Continued elsewhere

I've decided to abandon this blog in favor of a newer, more experimental hypertext form of writing. Come over and see the new place.

Saturday, July 26, 2003

The web language mess

Well, I was just forced to do modifications to a CSS file to get this thing the way I liked. Gad, what an ugly mess of syntax the whole web world is. I've never been involved in constructing any but simple websites (static or dynamic via HTML generation), so I've never been forced to deal with the horrible mess of HTML, Javascript, Java, CSS, PHP, and all the browser-specific variations thereof. Fortunately I never will, there are armys of unemployed web hackers out there to hire if things ever get that far, but it's a pity it requires so much useless and divergent expertese. Reminds me of Unix (and I'm sure it's not a coincidence).

I have friends trying to fix this with a single language that is supposed to be elegant, powerful, and capable of replacing the mess. The idea of Water is to combine features of Lisp, Javascript (prototype-based OOP), all in a unified XML syntax. The big problem here (aside from the general problem of getting a new language accepted at all) is that nobody really wants to write code using an XML syntax.

If they put a GUI front-end (or even a Lisp-syntax front-end) they might have something.

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