It's Too Quiet, Out There!

I feel like one of those guys in the old Western movies, this week. You know, the bearded old guy in the wagon train who opines "I don't like it. It's too quiet out there!" just before all Hell breaks loose.

Things seem pretty good, right now. When you think about it, most computers work very well, very often. You can summon more page-layout power in any of today's word processors than the first page-layout programs had. You used to have to call the bank and get transfered to a teller, but today your checking account balance is only a couple of clicks and a maiden name away.

In 1986 I bought my first home computer, a Macintosh 512ke and a dot-matrix ImageWriter, and an Apple 300/1200 baud modem for about $2250. There were a few things I wanted then that I didn't get immediately, because I didn't think I could really afford $2500 for such an expensive toy. I enjoyed a 9" black-and-white screen, filled with 9pt type, limited beeps and burps from a single tiny speaker and the "Near Laser Quality" printed output of my efforts in MacWrite. Within the year, I bought an external 800k floppy disk drive, and then a MacBottom 20 21MB hard drive which very comfortably held every program I owned and might ever want to use. I felt like Gordon Gecko, then. I could summon the power of RedRyder and dial-up faraway bulletin boards and subscription services and check the price of stocks I could no longer afford to buy, having just purchased a new Apple Macintosh. The world was at my fingertips.

There was no color. No stereo. No gaming, immediately. Certainly no shopping at the time. Nothing at all like blogs, or personal domains or Amazon.com. No eBay, no YouTube, no Facebook. But we thought we were happy.

Whenever there is change, the easy stuff always gets done first. The low-hanging fruit of fuel economy comes from building smaller cars with four-cylinder engines and more and better computer monitoring of the various systems. And so it goes with computing.

We got word processors, because that was an easy sell. Well, of course if you buy a new computer, you can get a word processor and boss your words around the screen, adding and deleting text on a whim, instead of burning an entire typewritten page because of a single eroor at the very bottom. So yeah, word processors. Why not? But then right away the writers of the world started asking for new features. We needed to be able to set our own margins. We needed word counters. We needed spell checkers. We needed to be able to change fonts. We needed all kinds of things, and a great many were included in Version Two. More calls for features, and occasionally a few new theories of How Things Should Work, and Version Three happened. And a half-dozen years ago, I read that the feature count in Microsoft's Word was up over 3500. And the people who had so lovingly crafted the latest version of Word all still had jobs. They were busy building yet-another New&Improved Word.

I don't know, but it seems to me that when you've added outlining, auto-indexing, automatic Tables of Contents, automatic spell checking and typo fixing and the ability to watch television in your word processor, you've probably added about all of the features that anybody really needs. But there will be yet another version of Word some day.

But what about HTML? The rules of the version of HTML we use today were set down more than a decade ago. Back before handheld computing, wireless networking, and Britney Spears.

Think about that for a moment. You are not probably driving the same car, doing the same job, living with the same people or in the same house. You almost certainly aren't using the same word processor, spreadsheet, web browser or computer you had back then. But we are still using the HTML we learned while stockpiling food and water for Y2K.

We have not seen a revision to the HTML specification in a lot of years. That may be changing, one day. We may yet see an HTML 5. They are talking about it now, in the hallowed and metaphorical halls of the W3C. Better learn as much as you can about the version we have now. It will probably be a whole lot easier to learn the differences than to start learning one and switch to the other.

A lot has changed. Maybe we do need a newer, fresher version of the language to reflect that.