[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Academia needed the Web (Re: Success factors for the Web and SemanticWeb
Robin Berjon writes: > That's why I think Uche is right when he says that there probably > wasn't a "real" need for the www when it was created. I cannot speak for the corporate world, since I was not a part of it in 1989/90, but there was a loud, screaming need for something like the Web in academia, especially for publishing and sharing teaching material. People were spending more and more time developing proprietary tutorials and courseware with Toolbuilder and similar platforms, and had a lot of trouble sharing it (if the students tried to take it home, tech support was a nightmare). Still, I was reluctant to start with the HTML, because it seemed extremely weak compared to what I expected for Hypertext and courseware; as a medievalist, however, I had had it drilled into me that low-quality/high-volume *always* wins (i.e. crowded school and chancery scripts over elegant monastic scripts, paper over parchment, printing over calligraphy, American culture over ... oops, sorry), so in 1993 I decided to bet that HTML would win in exactly the same way (Gopher was too brain-dead to even consider): I led a team of four teaching staff to write a complete basic-level English grammar for the University of Ottawa's Writing Centre, then shocked the administration by insisting on releasing it for free on the Internet rather than trying to sell it on floppies (standard practice at the time). We finished, I think, in 1994, and it's still online (it looks like someone has gone in and fixed some of the typos since I left the university in 1996): http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/grammar.html As an historical footnote, we did the whole thing as a single SGML document and then used Perl to generate the 1,000 or so intensely-linked HTML pages -- that was my motivation to write SGMLSpm. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/
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