On Monday, April 23, 2012 11:20 AM (UTC+12) Greg wrote:- > When these sorts of discussions get started, I am reminded of the > following quote - > > "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." > - Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943 -------------------------------- The concept of personal/home computing hadn't surfaced in 1943, and if Thomas Watson had still been alive in 1973, he'd probably have coined the phrase, "Thirty years is a very long time in computing!" The dawn of the home computer had arrived and within the next decade the genisis of the PC was developed and the likes of Atari and Sinclair PC's reached the market place in the early 1980's. Back to the original question. The Worldwide web consortium (W3C) has the responsibility for ensuring that HTML / XML standards are adopted where proposed by browser designers, and deemed as appropriate. Their provisional proposals are implemented independantly by each browser developer and when finally adopted each browser will provide the same rendering of a given object. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) fall into the same category. Those standards have evolved over the years and the proposed HTML version 5 is currently being adopted and implemented, but in the process the browsers are designed to accept and render deprecated code from earlier versions of HTML / CSS when encountered. So, the best way of ensuring your webpages are rendered correctly in the future is by making them compliant in either the current HTML version 4 XHTML Strict mode or HTML version 5 - which renders in Strict mode by default when the page starts with <!doctype html>. The W3C Validator is invaluable in checking you have things right. JavaScript is a end-user script language that allows manipulation of your page to ensure for instance; that the page renders correctly depending on the display size etc., and that some of the complex functions associated with form checking etc. can be accomplished prior to forwarding the data to the server. There are a number of JavaScript libraries around, of which jQuery is a notable one, and in general they will be supported well into the future. Other languages are implemented serverside, and at the end of the day they are all designed to input HTML data and ouput HTML data by whatever means they use. Image formats may change in the future, but like HTML, backwardly compatible conversion of formats will ultimately occur to allow their rendering in the format of the day. My advice is do the best you can now and that will pay off in the future. The longevity of your work will of course depend on having continuing server support, and currently those pages hosted by Rootsweb are likely to be available into the future, even if they become hosted by another entity. The Wayback Machine will most likely have a copy if all else fails! Barry
On 23/04/2012 3:26 PM, Barry Carlson wrote: > On Monday, April 23, 2012 11:20 AM (UTC+12) > Greg wrote:- > >> When these sorts of discussions get started, I am reminded of the >> following quote - >> >> "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." >> - Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943 > -------------------------------- > > The concept of personal/home computing hadn't surfaced in 1943, and if > Thomas Watson had still been alive in 1973, he'd probably have coined the > phrase, "Thirty years is a very long time in computing!" The dawn of the > home computer had arrived and within the next decade the genisis of the PC > was developed and the likes of Atari and Sinclair PC's reached the market > place in the early 1980's. Then there is Ken OLSEN, and he said - > "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." > > - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment > Corp., 1977 > The point I was trying to make was that no one, not even those apparently in authority, have any idea what will happen in the future. I am not sure if there is any certainty of the web pages that we create today will still be available in the future. Books may be out of fashion somewhat, but if enough of them are lodged in enough libraries, maybe one will survive. We can only do the best we can with the tools we have (following Barry's advice) and hope that some of it will still be there when our ggggggrandchildren are around to go looking for us. Greg