[whatwg] OT history Re: Authoring

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:07:29 +0100, Ron van den Boogaard <ron at ronvdb.com> wrote:

>
>> On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:47:50 +0100, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>>> As people got printers and desktop publishing a
>>> few people made the crazy multi-font unreadable pages that were all
>>> the rage in the mid-80s
>
> Rather a judgemental view. Some of the greatest design work was done
> then. Most notably by Carson. (Remember Raygun magazine?)

No I don't, but I agree that great work was done then. It was also the first time a lot of us got the ability to print up menus at the school shop in illegible gothic scripts, and put fancy ribbons on the background to help disguise them. And a lot of us (like me) who have no real design talent spent a while doing things like this because it was new and shiny. (Well, as I said in the bit you quoted, a few people at least).

I also have a harsh judgemental view of some of the stuff done in the mid-90s on the web, when for the first time lots of people got let loose on it. At the same time there were lots of very clever people doing very clever stuff. Sadly, the bulk of us are not really outstandingly good at everything we do (by definition, actually). So it isn't hard to find a period in history where a few people have produced rubbish. The point was (in a somewhat rhetorical way) to try and show what "ordinary folks" tended to do with various new technologies...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
  Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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