It's a Wonderful (Markup) Life

Did you see this?

Bob Sutor's autobiographical essay , "I'm a document guy," is something like a Norman Rockwell painting of a slice of life across the decades at the Diner in Potter's Falls. In it he covers his life's experiences in using computers to markup documents, from text-processing the high school newspaper to helping his future wife format her undergrad thesis.

Documents represent the basis for how we store the information that will become our history. Software applications and companies will come and go, market leaders will change, and certainly all of us will be replaced by a new and younger generation of people who think about information in very different ways. The choices we make today are important and will have implications that will play out over a much longer time than the history of word processing and office suites to date.

It's an unexpectedly touching story of the importance of a universal document format.