[X4U] browser decomposition??

[Douglas P. McNutt]

At 10:43 -0600 2/8/06, nk wrote:
>yer saying windoze browsers sort of break down by design?
>On Feb 8, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Lists wrote:
>>"WinRot" is a well-documented fact.  It even has a cute nickname.

Browsers do rot.

It's quite the same as my absolute disgust for the use of  "data" or  "scissors" in the singular. It's also a bit like my grade school teacher teaching that the proper term is negro and never that other n-word or "black". A person from the Orient was properly denoted an Oriental and it was a compliment.

It took a whole generation in the 20th century for once-proper words to become offensive. It took all of the 17th and 18th centuries for a bunch of medical terms to become X-rated.

We now live in a world where web pages metamorphose into an entirely new language in less than a decade. Acronyms become words like "blog" in two years. Cascading style sheets, now ubiquitous, were unheard of in the era of 68k Macs.

It's possible, with effort, to read Chaucer from 1360 or so. What will it take to read a 2005 web page in 650 years? USB? RS232? Morse code? C+++++++?

It's the language that rots, not the browsers or the human species, but it might as well be the software. We would be better off with some communication standards that last a generation but it's unlikely to happen. There's too much money involved in assuring obsolescence. By changing the web I can sell everyone a new computer and assure that his old one will not be useful in the neighborhood school.

Yeah. I'm 70+ and FORTRAN still works.

-- 

--> From the U S of A, the only socialist country that refuses to admit it. <--