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If you think that HTML is bad as a formatting language due to the poor quality documents that result, think about it from the web server/client point of view. It's even worse.There is so much logic that has to go into parsing an HTML page that web programs (servers, clients, CGI scripts) have to be incredibly complex. This is error prone. Because HTML was designed as a human-readable formatting language (based upon SGML, which is the original evil) it is inherently complicated from the computer's point of view. People forget formatting tags, or use incorrect formatting tags, or type in the formatting tags using incorrect syntax. There are a million problems of this type that HTML parsers have to deal with. More fundamentally, HTML is just a stream of text and lacks any fundamental structure which makes the parsing even more difficult. Plus there are tons of ambiguities in the HTML specs coupled with archaic conventions which must be adhered to even thoug...
Philg writes about how Apple bought the NeXT OS and how this is essentially the same as buying 12-year-old technology as an attempt to rectify problems in a much more modern OS (MacOS).While it is correct that Apple bought the NeXT OS, the analogy is not correct, for one simple reason: Apple has not made a single substantial change to the MacOS since sometime in the mid-80's. The MacOS has 90% of the problems that it did then (philg likes to ridicule modern OS's because they are less reliable than those of the 60's and 70's, but doesn't seem to complain so much about the MacOS, which has, for the past 10 years, been the most primitive OS available, period).
Therefore to compare Apple buying the MacOS to GM buying the blueprints for the 1985 Toyota Camry is misguided; instead, he should be comparing this purchase to GM buying the blueprints for the 1985 Toyota Camry to help replace its own 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme -- in 1997.
By the way, Apple'...