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Abstract
Shame and War Revisited
Adding Semantic Markup to HTML
Philip Greenspun
Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"HTML represents the worst of two worlds. We could have taken a formatting language and added hypertext anchors so
that users had beautifully designed documents on their desktops. We could have developed a powerful document
structure language so that browsers could automatically do intelligent things with Web documents. What we have got
with HTML is ugly documents without formatting or structural information." I wrote that in August 1994. In the
intervening 18 months, style sheets have substantially enhanced HTML's formatting capabilities, but no progress has
been made on the structure problem. I propose a class-based semantic markup system compatible with existing browsers
and HTTP servers.
Introduction
"Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years,
we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose
Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later, on even more adverse terms than at present."
Winston Churchill in a letter to Lord Moyne, 1938 [Gilbert 1991]
If you asked a naive user what the Web would do for them, they'd probably say "I could ask my computer to find me the
cheapest pair of blue jeans being sold on the Internet and 10 seconds later, I'd be staring at a photo of the product and
being asked to confirm the purchase. I'd see an announcement for a concert and click a button on my Web browser to
add the date to my calendar; the information would get transferred automatically."
We computer scientists know that the Web doesn't actually work this way for naive users. Of course, armed with 20
years of Internet experience and the latest in equipment and software, we computer scientists go out into the Web and...
fall into exactly the same morass. When we find a conference announcement, we can't click the mouse and watch entries
show up in our electronic calendars. We will have to wait for computers to develop natural language understanding and
common sense reasoning. That doesn't seem like such a long way off until one reflects that, given the ability to
understand language and reason a bit, the computer could go to college for four years and come back capable of taking
over our job.
Recently adopted HTML styles sheets offer us a glimmer of hope on the formatting front. It may yet be possilbe to
render a novel readbly in HTML. However, style sheets can't fix all of HTML's formatting deficiencies and certainly
don't accomplish anything on the semantic tagging front.
Fixing the formatting problem; frames are not the answer (but maybe style
sheets are)
When a reader connects to a $100,000 Web server via a $10,000/month T3 line, his first thought is likely to be "Wow,
this document looks almost as good as it would if had been hastily printed out from a simple word processor." His
second thought is likely to be "Wow, this document looks only almost as good as it would if had been hastily printed
out from a simple word processor."
Increased formatting capabilities are fundamentally beneficial. It is more efficient for one person to spend a few days
formatting a document well than for 20 million users to each spend five minutes formatting a document badly. Yet the
original Web model was the latter. Users would edit resource files on the Unix machines or dialog boxes on their
Macintosh to choose the fonts, sizes, and colors that best suited their hardware and taste. Still, when they were all done,
Travels with Samantha and the Bible ended up looking more or less the same.