5.2 HyperText Markup Language
HTML and the World-Wide Web have become so ubiquitous in our modern world – and have also been so debased through their usage for crass commercial purposes – that it is hard now to remember the original miracle.
It may help to recount my own personal history of writing tools.
I started out with pen or pencil and paper, and cursive penmanship – a subject in school that merited a barely passing grade for me. Nonetheless, I started writing early, and enjoyed the process.
I started typing in college, using a typewriter with the hunt and peck approach, having never been taught how to use a keyboard in any sort of efficient or effective manner.
I finally learned touch-typing in an adult education class that I took in the autumn following my graduation from college.
When I started professional programming, I wrote things down – again, using pen or pencil – on paper coding sheets that were then given to a group of keypunch operators so that they could translate my hen scratchings onto punched cards.
My first personal computer was an Osborne 1 that came with a copy of WordStar, my first Word Processor application. It was relatively primitive by today’s standards but, when accompanied by an early dot-matrix printer, it actually allowed a user to make corrections and other changes, and to print out a copy to share with others whenever needed.
And then further refinements followed, culminating in MS Word, laser printers and PDF documents.
But then, HTML and the Web came along, providing all of the following improvements.
HTML documents could be authored and edited and read using any of a number of different software applications, running on pretty much any computing platform.
HTML is written using plain text, so anyone could see how HTML documents were constructed, and could even write software to generate their own HTML docs.
HTML documents could be published on the Web, instead of on paper, providing access to anyone on the Internet.
HTML docs did not have to be formatted to be printed on a particular page size – instead, they could reflow dynamically to fit whatever output size the reader preferred, even allowing the reader to adjust the font size dynamically.
HTML documents could be easily updated at any time – even in their published form! – making ongoing corrections and improvements a possibility.
Each HTML document published to the Web was assigned its own unique and unchanging address, making it easy for others to reference and share.
One HTML document could link to others!
Probably any one or two of these would have been enough to convince me that HTML documents were an improvement over word processing files, but all seven…?! Why would anyone not use HTML, once it became available?
And so, Notenik uses HTML internally to format its display of a Note, and also makes it easy to use your Notes to generate HTML, and create web pages, and even an entire website.