The Technicalities Matter A Lot, But The

I Have Long Been Alarmed By People's Sheeplike Acceptance Of The Term 'computer Technology' - It Sounds So Objective And Inexorable - When Most Computer Technology Is Really A Bunch Of Ideas Turned Into Conventions And Packages.

The Point Is That These Decisions They've Made Are Partly For Your Convenience And Partly For Theirs And Partly Out Of Stereotypes That They Carry With Them From The Conventions Of The Computer Field.

I Am A Design Chauvinist. I Believe That Good Design Is Magical And Not To Be Lightly Tinkered With. The Difference Between A Great Design And A Lousy One Is In The Meshing Of The Thousand Details That Either Fit Or Don't, And The Spirit Of The Passionate Intellect That Has Tied Them Together, Or Tried. That's Why Programming - Or Buying Software - On The Basis Of "lists Of Features" Is A Doomed And Misguided Effort. The Features Can Be Thrown Together, As In A Garbage Can, Or Carefully Laid Together And Interwoven In Elegant Unification, As In Apl, Or The Forth Language, Or The Game Of Chess.

The World Wide Web Is Precisely What We Were Trying To Prevent. We Long Ago Foresaw The Problems Of One-way Links, Links That Break (no Guaranteed Long-term Publishing), No Way To Publish Comments, No Version Management, No Rights Management.

So In My Uncertainty, I Went To Graduate School And There It All Happened.