Subject: Re: Interesting Design News



sorry folks, an impacted rant has just found something to focus on.  
details will be presented in a more moderate tone as soon as my blood
pressure gets back down into the triple digits.



> >More than anyone, Siegel can lay claim to being the father of Web
> >design.

<rant class=TURBO>

oh bull-SHIT.

the kindest thing anyone can possibly say about him without inventing
a new way to spell 'reality' is that he successfully identified a
rhetoric which would appeal both to pinhead marketing executives who
wouldn't know well-organized content if it bit them in the ass, and to
the bottom dwellers of the graphic design field, who not only know
less about content, but abhor the thought of any member of the
previous group spending money on anything other than their pretty,
disgustingly overpriced, pictures.   his success is based strictly
upon his publisher's ability to identify the massive potential for
gleaning a finder's fee in making him Mister FeelGood The Matchmaker,
who brings the pinheads with money together with the pinheads who draw
pictures, and convinces them it's morally acceptable to breed.   his
entire list of contributions to the field of graphic design as it
applies to hypertext and electronic media.. assuming such a thing
legitimately exists, but even allowing the plagarized version.. is
about as lasting and meaningful as a rescoring of the first six bars
of _Ode to Joy_ for kazoo and farting.



> >With his 1996 book "Creating Killer Web Sites" he declared HTML's
> >transformation from a structural language to a presentation language. 

and *this* i find annoying.. 

for once and for all:  HTML is not now, nor has it ever been, a
presentation language.   the single, central, one-and-only, most
important thing a presentation language offers is a clear and
unambiguous means of describing the display space, and HTML DON'T GOT
THAT.   

there is nothing in HTML that allows a designer to assign any kind of
normed metric, spatial or otherwise, to a document's display space. 
if you don't have a metric, you don't have a concept of relative
position.   if you don't have a normal point (aka: an origin), you
don't have a concept of absolute position.   if anyone can present a
convincing argument which supports the existence of a presentation
language with no defined concept of position, i will personally
refrain from driving a railroad spike through their head the next time
i catch them using the term "placement on the page".

HTML specifically, explicitly, "yes, we're sure we really want to do
this", leaves the concept of display space undefined.   it is a
CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for content, and as a side-effect of the need to
make the various forms of classification accessible in a non-markup
context, a trivial set of positional constraints was imposed upon the
visual representation of HTML's various classifiers.   the illusion
that HTML offers anything even vaguely simlilar to a display system is
an accident which should be blamed on the browsers, not on HTML.

if you want a presentation language, use PostScript or TeX.   they're
both very good, very well defined systems for defining just exactly
how a two-dimensional image should be represented by any device, and
they do their best to assure that the output of any two compliant
devices will be as close to identical as the constraints of their
physical systems allow.   that's what 'presentation' friggin' MEANS
fer pete's sake.   HTML doesn't do that, therefore (everybody join in
when you think you know the words) HTML is not a presentation language.

the fundamental purpose of HTML is to allow unambiguous specification
of relative position among documents in a   ==>HYPER<==   spatial
construct.   there is no accurate N-dimensional representation for a
generic hyperspatial object.   if i design a website and you find a
way to generate an N-dimenesional map which accurately represents the
linking structure and content disposition of that site, i can change
the design and invalidate not only your map, but your entire set of
mapping conventions.   that's it, end of story, sucker bet for anyone
dumb enough to take it.

the thing that makes HTML useful, interesting, and valuable is its
ability to describe the relationships *between* items of content.  
the fact that documents have to be displayed somehow before the
relationships are easily accessible is a side effect of people using 
the language, not a purpose of the language itself.

</rant>

*puff*


sorry all.. both my mother and my sister are learning HTML.   genocide
being frowned on in polite society, i have to sublimate as best i can.