![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
in which I get needlessly picky with some online journo again.
Charles Arthur suggests that the spread of the web was caused by the fact that it wasn't patented. Well, if that's so, then how come the existing protocols:
On top of that, as soon as Netscape had a lead in the market, they made huge efforts to retain that leadership through driving HTML - perhaps the unfettered part of the web that Arthur is really referring to, although he's not exactly clear about that - in directions that suited them. <BLINK>, anyone? Microsoft did likewise, and continue to do so, using non-standard tags and the like in an attempt to provide a suitably tempting piece of added value that will persuade customers to give up on the competition. And yet through that driving towards some semblance of proprietary code - which the W3C implicitly endorsed several times by updating the official standards to match the de facto ones - we got Java, Flash, plugins in general (admittedly now under threat from the Eolas lawsuit) and, by and large, more powerful HTML features.
That aside, the quote above is itself largely incorrect in that gopher and ftp were, at the time, more manual affairs without the clicky goodness of HTML; the first browser (available for public use by telnetting to a CERN machine) used a page trailer list of footnotes to link other documents (no clicking here, m'lud); and the whole argument about which platform your software patent is based on is a complete straw man which has no useful relevance to the argument. Even the bit about basing your work on the work of others, well, jeez. Every second patent does that; even the much-vaunted Segway required someone to invent - and patent - gyroscopes, stepper motors, low-density high-power batteries, and so on. Few if any patents stand on their own
Software Patents are indeed bad, but it doesn't help to pick examples that don't properly support your hypothesis.
PS this is largely a top-of-head rant. feel free to criticise and nitpick, since that's exactly what I'm doing myself.
"[it] wasn't just that it let you click about from place to place; that had always been possible using protocols such as "gopher" and plain old file transfer ("ftp")."didn't spawn such a spread? Perhaps because what launched the web, really and truly threw it in your face like nothing before, was the client? Specifically, Mosaic, which was under such legal wraps that Netscape Communications Corporation changed their name from Mosaic Communications Corporation when UIUC "expressed concern" about the choice of name? The same Mosaic which was subsequently licensed to the likes of Quarterdeck, Spry, and Microsoft?
On top of that, as soon as Netscape had a lead in the market, they made huge efforts to retain that leadership through driving HTML - perhaps the unfettered part of the web that Arthur is really referring to, although he's not exactly clear about that - in directions that suited them. <BLINK>, anyone? Microsoft did likewise, and continue to do so, using non-standard tags and the like in an attempt to provide a suitably tempting piece of added value that will persuade customers to give up on the competition. And yet through that driving towards some semblance of proprietary code - which the W3C implicitly endorsed several times by updating the official standards to match the de facto ones - we got Java, Flash, plugins in general (admittedly now under threat from the Eolas lawsuit) and, by and large, more powerful HTML features.
That aside, the quote above is itself largely incorrect in that gopher and ftp were, at the time, more manual affairs without the clicky goodness of HTML; the first browser (available for public use by telnetting to a CERN machine) used a page trailer list of footnotes to link other documents (no clicking here, m'lud); and the whole argument about which platform your software patent is based on is a complete straw man which has no useful relevance to the argument. Even the bit about basing your work on the work of others, well, jeez. Every second patent does that; even the much-vaunted Segway required someone to invent - and patent - gyroscopes, stepper motors, low-density high-power batteries, and so on. Few if any patents stand on their own
Software Patents are indeed bad, but it doesn't help to pick examples that don't properly support your hypothesis.
PS this is largely a top-of-head rant. feel free to criticise and nitpick, since that's exactly what I'm doing myself.
no subject
Ding!
Once Mosaic hit, web pages were easy to create, easy to link to one another and navigate around, and were highly visual.
I remember documenting a WAIS interface for my university in '93 and thinking that it was pretty hot stuff. I graduated and went home, where I was stuck with telnet access via my Apple IIgs, and started getting emails from friends telling me how cool this Web thing was. Even lynx over a VT102 impressed me with its ease of use, but once I upgraded to something that could handle graphics, all bets were off.
(I still have that telnet account, though.)
no subject
"Why the web spread" has many answers, and all matter; had some key part of web access been patented, perhaps it would not have spread (since free browsers would not have likely existed). Certainly this article misphrases this concept, given, of course, gopher and ftp.
[It wasn't just the client, though; it was the protocol (and more importantly, the document format) itself that provided the opportunity for such a client. Ftp didn't have any way to have links, no matter how spiffy a client you'd have made.]
much-vaunted
(Anonymous) 2004-01-12 09:36 pm (UTC)(link)The Segway does! HAW HAW!
-r.
no subject
no subject
no subject
[1] I always read this as "I'm Anal", for some reason.