I did refer to HTML or the web as an agglutinative mess. If you consider
its evolution over time, first we had simple HTML, which was entirely a
declarative textual display language which could render text and display
but not render images. It lacked the complete 2-D imaging model of
PostScript, which could draw any line and fill any 2-D shape, and its
elegant 2-D transformation matrix. Then we had the addition of JavaScript
and the DOM to give it a procedural ability. Note that Python and
other languages existed, and the choice of inventing JavaScript as a C-like
interpretive language, at the time, and conflating its name with Java is
really strange. The result was powerful but the entire paradigm of
manipulating the DOM to animate is awkward. Then over time pretty much
everything that was missing from the model was added, but due to the
agglutinative nature of the process it wasn't clean. For example rendering
text in SVG has an odd choice or non-choice of coordinate space with 0,0 in
the upper left, uses the older HTML mechanism, which was never designed to
accurately position and size text. In my code this means I take the
bounding boxes of text and iteratively apply a scale factor and clean up
its rendering. And then the Canvas was added, duplicating much of the
functionality of SVG but in a raster paradigm. So, you have two completely
separate graphical spaces (not considering WebGL) and you can do
Porter-Duff compositing in both!

It makes Perl look neat and non-duplicative in function.

Now, if we consider PostScript, it's a complete 2-D display model designed
as a piece, except that they wanted to keep the font file to themselves,
and this was a mistake they had to back out of, and OpenType is an
improvement over it anyway. And then we had PDF, which was a simplification
of PostScript which tokenizes the operators and leaves out the procedural
operations, but it's a logical subset.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Wed, Jan 1, 2025 at 7:11 AM <karl@???> wrote:

> Didier:
> > Le 01/01/2025 à 06:44, Bruce Perens via Dng a écrit :
> > > I never got to work with NeWS, but I had a NeXT Workstation at Pixar.
> > > Very nice platform, not the aggulutinative mess that the Web Browser
> > > ended up being. The closest thing to it today would be SVG, but
> > > unfortunately SVG is also something of a mess because of its
> > > relationship with HTML.
> >

> >      Why do you consider HTML a mess? I find it rather usefull.

>
> There is no statement in his text pointing to that HTML is a mess.
> BTW, latex is messy, but I like it and it is very useful.
> So that something is messy doen't imply that it isn't useful.
>
> Regards,
> /Karl Hammar
>
>
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--
Bruce Perens K6BP