Saturday, September 19, 2009

a history of heartaches

On page two of a three-page AppleInsider article, that spends the first two on a history of HTML and the web, leading up to a discussion of HTML 5 on the third, there is a chart which traces the development of both web standards and browsers over the period from 1990 to the present. For anyone with more than casual involvement with any part of that process, that's a chart that should be drawn in blood, sweat, and tears.

My own involvement was mainly investing the effort to learn HTML, XHTML, CSS, a good chunk of JavaScript, and the basics of the DOM, before deciding that the powers that be for the web had better get their act together before asking poor chumps like myself to jump through any more hoops. (I also needed to be able to generate real-time, synthesized sound in response to user input for the project I was working on.)

As it turned out, most of what I went to the trouble to learn has continued to be relevant, so if I ever regain interest in writing more than the most basic sort of web page, I'll have a jumpstart. I was lucky in that respect.

No comments: