dive into mark

Anil Dash: Stories and Tools.

Think of Hotmail. It’s designed to give you a place to write emails, read them, and move them into folders. These kinds of functions in a desktop operating system are automatic: you just drag and drop. But to enable that kind of simple action in a web page, programmers have to jump through hoops, trying to make a story act like a tool.

And notice who has to do that? Programmers. But HTML isn’t a programming language. It’s designed to be written by authors, not programmers. There are tags to describe the parts of a structured story. There’s in fact a formal Document Type Description for hierarchically structured documents — XHTML. Curiously absent, unfortunately, is a description for a Web Tool Document.

Read on for a proposed solution, a standard cross-platform infrastructure for creating web-based applications that could eventually rival the richness and affordances and general user interface goodness desktop applications. No, it’s not Flash.

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