energy

I don’t like Year-In-Review / Top 10 of 2001 / A Look Back at 2001 pieces in any media. Why aren’t there pieces on “the last 7 years in music” or “15 years in journalism.” Longer time spans would help us learn more about larger trends. We might even gain a better sense of time. If we’re looking back 12 months, how will we, particularly the young, get a sense of the past? I’d be happy with “the last 3 recessions in American history” or “150 years of the history of Afghanistan” or even “the use of electronics in pop music since the 60’s.” I f I want a high-level view of the past year, I can look at 12 months of magazine covers. However, I would prefer to learn something about history.

But then, few have a gift for putting events and time into perspective. Perhaps the reason we don’t see more of what I want is because few can actually do the kind of research and thinking to put them together. Maybe I need to watch C-SPAN more. Booknotes, for example. often has smart people with something to say about history. And why? Because ideally, authors spend time and energy to compile lots of information, and sift through all of it to get a sense of what happened. I’d like more news outlets to act like historians. If they did, perhaps we’d all be better prepared for unexpected events.

Whither WaSP?
Do I have the the earliest mention of the Web Standards Project on usenet?

I ask only because the Google usenet archive is current news right now. And another piece of current news is that the Web Standards Project is going on hiatus. I think WSP pushed for good things from Netscape and Microsoft. I had a part in writing the mission statement. I’ve had that early email of the alpha version of the mission statement on my site for a while. It evolved with the work of many more articulate than I into a fine mission statement. I wish that the [stds] mailing list archive were online. I’d like to be able to see those first discussions again—that vital energy was infectious, and empowering. We felt like we could take on the world! Or at least change the software development directions of two multimillion dollar companies.

In the end, I don’t know how much effect WSP had. But it remains as it has been in my Fellow Founding Member biography: I am “proud to be involved, even cursorily, with something as worthwhile as the WaSP.

Quote of the Day:

I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe – they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information needed a different program to access it.

– Tim Berners Lee, Inventor of the Web [via zeldman]