Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Cast your mind back to the halcyon days of the late ’90s. Windows 95/98. Internet Explorer 4. Before you laugh, consider that IE4 included some pretty cutting-edge technology for the time: Dynamic HTML, TLS 1.0, single sign-on, streaming media, and “Channels” before RSS. IE4 even pioneered — unsuccessfully — the idea of “web browser as…
I can’t help it. I just love big, complicated systems that let you get really precise about what you’re talking about. Types, classes, ontologies, schemas, normalization, denormalization, XML, RDF, XSLT, Java, … It’s all so cool. I can happily spend hours scribbling pages of hierarchies, interfaces, specifications, file formats, and the like. But at the…