Dave Winer wants CSS to be Logo. Or, as Lambda the Ultimate would put it, he wants CSS to be a programmatic design language instead of a declarative design language. There is already a programmatic design language for the web, it’s called Flash. Dave even knew this in 1997, and hoped that Flash would someday come preinstalled on every browser. This has since come to pass; virtually every desktop computer comes preinstalled with a web browser that comes preinstalled with Flash.
Flash-based weblogs would be difficult to link to, would likely consume enormous amounts of bandwidth, would certainly be inaccessible to search engines, and would be even less accessible to people with disabilities than the current crop of weblogs. And Dave, as the CEO of his own company in a free and capitalist society, is perfectly free to base the next version of Radio around Flash. But other than as a 5-minute thought experiment (“Flash-based weblogs, what a wretched idea!”) I’m not sure what this has to do with CSS.
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© 2001–present Mark Pilgrim