D a r k
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Historical Background |
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When long time ago I wrote "Dark side..." it was nothing more than the result of momentary impulse, nanosecond lapse of reason, instantaneous failure of some synaptical circuit, brief moment of connection with anti-self -- and was never targeted as a tutorial, even much less posing as a scientific paper of any sort. At any rate, it had been written and dumped on the Web. I've got some positive, some negative and some puzzling response, couple of other pages had put a link to this page. My impulse passed, reasoninig recovered, synaptical circuits came back to normal and I pretty much forgot about it. I lived happily ever after for about a year, when aftershock of the original impulse suddenly echoed in my cortex. I decided to look at the logs when to my great suprize found my page still pumpin' up about a dozen visits a day! Also I discovered that HAL HTML Validation Service sneakily vanished and popped up as WebTechs HTML Validation Service. One (exactly) sharp-eyed reader also noticed that and was kind enough to send me small electronic epistle to notify about such dismal event. I think there may be couple more sharp-eyed readers who also might had noticed this fact, but they were either not kind enough to send me anything, or lazy enough or shy enough to send me nothing. Nevertheless, I philosophically accepted that loss of the links and decided to change nothing (not that it took too much effort, though). Another big event that severely affected my decision to update the page was sudden inclusion it to the immense, immeasurable array of links on the Bob Allison's "Web Masters" page -- after about nine months (coincedence?) since I created "Dark side...". Note the absense of the link. Fat lady sung for the mighty collosus of Bobaworld which probably was around from the beginning of the Web, taking away all famous omipresent award-winning quotes, mile-long lists of links, various picks of the day, leaving us the only reminder of the lost knowledge of the ancient art of making the Lists Of Links. I shiver in thought of that my page might be among the pieces of iceberg which sunk the majectic Titanic of the Web sites. Okay, eventually I grew tired of watching people reading my absurdful page with all the links broken and decided to clear the matters what resulted in this rather long note. Actual Information Starts Here"Dark Side of the HTML" was written in the September, 1995 and was up-to-date enough for those few who can distinguish SGML from HTML or BCPL or at least tell what all these acronyms mean. As of the moment of writing, my target was (almost) standard HTML-2.0 (now standard) and proposed HTML 3.0 (now replaced with 3.2). I decided to check all the examples against the most resent HTML-3.2 and found that nothing changed in the HTML world, which is what I vaguely expected. To be absolutely honest, I wrote previous and this sentences first, and then checked -- just in case if some of those anal-retentive types would ever bother to come by....(10 minutes later)... OK, now I'm really checked it -- it does still comply with all possible scientific HTML revisions. Unfortunately, since I upgraded my 17 incher to the ergonomic 80x24 green-on-black TTY I cannot perform browser comparision, but I boldly dare to predict that none of the browsers will render this HTML correctly (of course, excluding those cheaters who are using SGML parser underneath -- ming boggling spped of such parser alone is a solid guarantee of that they will never make it to the mainstream). Oh, yes, by the way, about this moral (or something) at the end -- it still applies, too. It does not have any connection with the main theme, but I was unable to keep myself away from from easy lure of posing as a Great and Mighty Master of Universal Knowledge. Or, as Ancient Romans would put it : "de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis". |
Updated on the 23rd of October, 1996.