Talking to a brick wall...

Rants & Raves

The Future of the Web

—[9-7-00] It all started with a new job. This summer, I had an excellent stroke of luck and found myself in a wondeful position at Netpliance. This started out, and went on for several weeks, with me as an E-mail technician. For this reason, I was removed from my usual online life and given a chance to ... well, take a new look at my habits in all things online.
After about a month, during which my friends actually became so surprised by my sudden disappearance that they actually set up a 'John Sightings' page, our e-mail department was outsourced. Unlike several E-mail techs, I was not moved over to the new e-mail thing, but instead was transferred to another part of the company. It was thus that I became a Test Technician.

Now, it is not my intention to talk too much about my job. This is in fact a rant/article about web technologies. The job is important, however, because as a Test Tech I found myself with a huge amount of free time.
Unlike the e-mail department, the Test Team is not exactly the most efficient part of our company, though this is not entirely our fault. Regardless, the free time that I found myself with was certainly not going to go to the same waste that so many other Test Team members put it to.

After a short period of feeling bad about not really doing anything productive for the job, I found myself looking into the years of web technology that I had been ignoring for far too long.
I started learning Javascript better, I looked into PERL for a while. I brushed up on my html, and after not too long bumped into the Web Standards Organization, which then pointed me to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Now, these are the guys who define the web file standards that we know and love, primarily HTML. On a whim, I began looking over their specification for HTML 4.0 just to see what was new. Imagine my surprise when I began reading that this format, in its purest form, didn't have or recommend such common tags as font, center, and break, and on top of that spoke out heavily against the use of tables for formatting!

These, my friends, are things that web designers have been doing, and continue to do, ever since the first person who wasn't a professor publishing data got their hands on the web. And now, it appeared, the W3C was trying to push the web back to those ancient days before style and formatting of any sort?
Needless to say, I was a bit confused and rather unimpressed with the W3C at that moment, but I persevered until I was able to find our more. >>