Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, but the Web was by amateurs?

Re:Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, but the ... by liotier on Monday March 25, 2013 @05:28AM (#5436183)

The whole reason why the HTML world took off while the existing technologies lingered is that amateurs could grab whatever they could and run with it - incompetence be damned ! Innovation often happens when amateurs find accessible technology and bend it in strange ways that make the professional cringe. Professional are then needed for security, scaling, cost reductions and all the things that require maturity but instead of innovating they would have refined the state of the art to new and still stagnating levels of perfection. Hurray for amateur enthusiasts who do interesting new things because no one told them it was the wrong way to do it !

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Re:Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, but the ... by qw on Monday March 25, 2013 @05:53AM (#5436239)

I agree. Many underestimate how the lack of strictness helped early users. You could start with plain text and add a few <br> or maybe a <p> (wIthout end tags) to create paragraphs.

Anyone with minimal knowledge could start sharing content. If they had to pass any kind of validation, many would not have bothered. Yes it was a mess, but it helped us get enough information to reach critical levels. I would rather have a web with messy HTML than FTP servers filled with Word documents or a proprietary AOL / MSN

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Re:Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, but the ... by KMag on Monday March 25, 2013 @11:00AM (#5437299)

The problem of broken markup would have been better solved on the server side, rather than the client side.

As a general principle, pushing denormalized data as far to the edges of the system as possible minimizes complexity of the system as a whole.

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Re:Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, but the ... by AlisdairO on Monday March 25, 2013 @07:18AM (#5436453)

Agreed!

The thing about the web is that it was for amateurs. Things like separation of content and style are great for engineers creating larger-scale maintainable sites, but they're absolutely not helpful for new users. Being able to take a text file and add a couple of tags around some text you want to emphasise is a positive advantage for such individuals. It rewards small experiments. Understanding CSS is, by contrast, quite the undertaking.

Hypertext had been around for quite some time before the web, and there's still some academics I know who seem to scratch their heads at the success of such an simplistic, impure form. To me, its simplicity is a reason for its success, while projects like Xanadu make a fundamental error in not considering enough the importance of barrier to entry.

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Re:Why did Alan Kay say the Internet was done well, but the ... by tbe on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @07:06PM (#5446646)

That last sentence reminds me of a quote from Ivan Sutherland:

When asked, "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?" Ivan replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."

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