Accept no substitutes

Day: March 27, 2006

That’s Lee-Berners Tim Sir to you

And only one slash. In an interview with Brian Runciman of the British Computer Society, the person hereafter known as Lee-Berners Tim Sir opines on the state of the Net including a note that he wishes he had done a few things differently. Dropping one slash (who cares most browers will add http:// anyhow) and that he had used the British name notation going from the more general to the more specific instead of the European/American model which goes like a mail address from specific to general and which by the way LBT Sir was very widely sided before you created the Web. Not complaining about your contributions but clarifying that the Net was well along and much established before the first http was typed. Pretty good interview overall.
At least one surprise, he wishes he had not included SGML folks:

Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?

I would have skipped on the double slash – there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order – in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:/uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary.

Later

Going back to the idea of anything I would change, I remember Dan Connolly – who really understood SGML – asking me if HTML was SGML. I really wanted the SGML people on board so I said yes.

I should have said no – and we would have developed XML a lot sooner. This all happened at the beginning of the Web, in a pub in Edinburgh. This May there’ll be discussions in pubs in Edinburgh again, where we can talk about what we’ll need to change now – it’ll be a blast.

Thanks to Sayan for the initial pointer.

Geek Irony at NewsWeek

The current NewsWeek, with cover story “Putting the We in WEb,” has a “How Geeky Are You? Quiz.” The quiz doesn’t show on the second most geeky of all combinations, Mac OSX and FireFox, and it tries to send you a pop-up advert!
This is sad.
Note: Newsweek is hosted by MSNBC.
UPDATE: Doesn’t work with Safari either.
UPDATE 2: Doesn’t work on Windoz with FireFox (Thanks Sayan for the Windoz testing)
UPDATE 3: Does work with Internet Exploiter on Windoz after sending a bunch of pop-up adverts.
UPDATE 4: Selffulfilling question:

19. Which Web browser do you use most at home? Explorer
Firefox
Safari
Opera
I wrote my own
What’s a Web browser?

UPDATE 5: Doesn’t render the quiz on Firefox 1.5 over Linux. (thanks DLS)

UPDATE 5.1a: the round-robin advert under what would have been the quiz depicts a very non-geeky Triceritops in a suit inviting us to explore the absolutely-devoid-of-geekdom Microsoft Office calendar.

UPDATE 6: Doesn’t work with Moz or FF in Linux (Thank Roblimo).

BOTTOM LINE: If you can take the quiz, you are not a geek.

UPDATE XXX: MCNBC just added a one line, “Click here to start the quiz”

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