web publishing

[miriam_e]

I've been reading Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing lately. It is a great book and available online for free or can be bought in dead trees version. I'm reading the online version -- I don't have the money or room for more paper books, and I prefer electronic text anyway.

The book is very interesting and echoes a lot of things I'm fond of telling people. I must be saying it wrongly or haven't enough social status, because when I tell them they roll their eyes and think I'm nuts. Maybe people will absorb it from Philip Greenspun. Though, maybe not -- he's been saying it for about 10 years.

I don't agree with everything that he says though. He thinks that the semantic web will happen and it is only a matter of people just getting on with it. I think the semantic web is a nice idea, but implementing it is likely to be far more difficult than most would suppose. I guess it will eventually come, but it might be something else that brings it in. The web might be too fixed in concrete to change much. Also his reasons for wanting the semantic web are partly to enable people to make pretty book-like pages. I don't really get this. Making the web imitate paper is a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons (some of which he himself points out). They are different technologies. It is like adding some cosmetic wheels to a bike to make it look like a car.

The web has abilities that are fundamentally different from paper. Doing things like adding left and right blank margins because people are used to them in paper books is stupid. The margins are there in paper because initially the paper-cutting was imprecise, and they stayed when paper-cutting was better so fingerprints didn't crap up the text. Also indenting the first line of a paragraph and eliminating the gap between paragraphs on web pages is dumb. The reason it is done on paper is to be able to print more on a scarce resource. Filling up all those blank lines between paragraphs means you can fit more on a page. Indenting the first line then lets you see where the paragraph begins, now that the blank line is gone. Page space is not a scarce resource on the web. The blank line makes reading easier, and the indented first line is no longer of use.

Often people do things for one reason only: because others do them. Even the free thinking Philip Greenspun falls prey to that. I'm sure I do at times too. It is so much a part of our psychology it is very hard to avoid. Whenever you find yourself justifying something because you "just like it that way" or "it is more elegant" or "it is more attractive" it is time to pull out the magnifying glass and examine your assumptions. The more strongly you resist unravelling those reasons then the more you can be assured that what you are really saying is "it's what other people do". This is the justification for building houses the same crap way we have for a thousand years, and justifies stupid dress codes, keeping people in poverty, and setting racial boundaries.

If we are to grow up as a species we need to question everything, especially our assumptions.

Oh my... I do follow tangents don't I.

Anyway, it is an excellent book, in spite of my minor disagreements with him. If you read it, be sure to read The book behind the book behind the book. It is a hilarious eye-opener about the difficulty of dealing with dead trees publishers, and explains why there are so many utterly pathetic computer books.