On HTML

My thoughts on HTML have changed over the years.

First, I used to love it. I discovered it when I was 12 or 13 and thought it was really impressive, it helped me make websites.

As an adult, when I started learning about history of computing, I realized it was a terrible idea. It's verbose, it needs so many symbols, it's not intuitive, it's messy, it's incomplete and can't express style. Most of this ideas were influenced by the Alan Kay and Bret Victor. They both think that the invention of the web was a step backwards in the history of computing. The creation of a language that is weaker that it's predecssor, that only helps expressing structure but not anything else.

Most recently I've learned to love it again. I see the beauty in it's simplicity and how it's thought around academic papers. Academic papers are important. They are one of the foundational building blocks of the modern world. HTML is good because it's used. It's sticky because it doesn't do much. Yes, it's just a markup language, it just help us anotate what is a title, what's a pragraph, and so on. But it also has the link, the anchor tag. Which sits on top of the HTTP methods and when that happens, boom! Now it starts to get powerful.

My recent appreciation for it came from thinking and over thinking about biological systems, Assembly Theory, and chemistry as a search engine. Most of these universal non-human technologies act like a search engine in some capactiy, throwing permutations at each other until one proves to be sticky. Once a combination of elements is sticky, things start to happen: plants, life, objects, media, etc. The universe, biological systems build on top of thigns that are easy to replicate and require very little resources, not of those that can do many things. Proliferation of a system is a bigger survival than an incredibly robust organism/agent. But I'm derailling by now.

I believe that, since we're mostly visual animals, and HTML is a language to build visual artifacts, meaning documents, that's all all the power it needs needs to do. It helps us humans represent ideas and interconnect them. The power is not in the programming capabilities in the language, is in the connection, in pointing at, in being pointed at, in the learning, in the sharing.