TimBr's "XML People"

Tim Bray's "XML People" is a great read for all of us in the file format corner. LOL at his personification of Microsoft ...

Mick is a domineering, ruthless, greedy, egotistical, self-centered, paranoid bastard. Whether or not he’s actually a crook is, as they say, currently the subject of litigation; but he’s not good company or a good friend. The ruthlessness and greed would not be so irritating (we swim, after all, in late-capitalist waters) were they not accompanied, at all times, by Mick’s claim to speak not in his own interest, but selflessly on behalf of his millions of customers, whose needs only he understands. Thus, anyone who disagrees is conspiring against the interests of the world’s computer users.

Mick’s other really irritating habit is constant grating prating about “great” products and “innovation”. Certain Microsoft executives are going to spend eternity fleeing around the bolgias of Hell from demons wielding branding irons on which “great software” and “innovation” glow white-hot. A very large majority in the computing trades think the products are mostly pretty poor, and see the company as the single greatest roadblock to innovation in our profession.

"Mick" is obviously Microsoft in the Brayian world while "Ned" is Netscape. TimBr's talking circa mid-1990's here ...

While Mick got with the XML program, Ned steadfastly ignored it.

This statement is supported deep in the terrific book, Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (Third Edition, Addison-Wesley 2005), by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. Lie & Bos wrote the First Edition in 1997 while at W3C. (Lie is now CTO of Opera Software, the book covers CSS 2.1).

If XML is all about content and content portability for the Web, then the yin to XML's yang is CSS, a portable layout standard for Web documents.

Marc Andreesen (NCSA Mosaic, then Netscape) didn't get either XML or CSS. Here's Andreesen in an e-mail ...   

In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to -- strap yourselves in, here it comes -- control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment: "Sorry, you're screwed."

... from Chapter 20 (or Chapter 18 in the Third Edition), "The CSS Saga".

Comments

[Gary Edwards]

Hey Sam, slight glitch. I think you meant:

"Marc Andreesen (Netscape, then NCSA Mosaic) didn't care for CSS."

"XML People" is indeed a great read.

One question though about the history of CSS. Why didn't OpenOffice adopt CSS as the presentation layer?

I had heard that when the Sun OO/StarOffice group was considering writing their own browser, one of the more important issues was that of writing XHTML+CSS formats natively in OOo. This decision predates Open Office XML, now ODF.

The story goes that when they cancelled the OO/SO browser, all work on XHTML+CSS ended. What happened next sounds like the stuff of legends, reminiscent of the fateful Andressen decision to ignore CSS. The Open Office XML format was designed not with the highly portable, infinitely interoperable CSS presentation layer, but with an entirely application specific presentation layer based on automatic-styles.

This decision to go with an application specific presentation layer continues to haunt ODF to this day. Perhaps more than any other aspect of ODF, the presentation layer is the cause of the current ODF interoperability nightmare.

One can't help but wonder what ODF interop would be like today if Sun had gone ahead with that XHTML+CSS browser initiative way back when.

~ge~