The last release was in 2012 - I'm curious why this made the HN home page. Am I missing some important news?
That's when I remembered Amaya which I first stumbled across back in 2007 or so when I was trying to figure out how to build a website for my practice (pretend work that was easier than trying to dig up clients on the cusp of the recession). What is interesting to me is how diverse browsers were in the days before Chrome. The old Opera is another example of what a web browser could be...or could have been.
XML was devised as an "easy" subset of SGML to eventually form the basis of HTML, SVG, and other web vocabularies; it just didn't make it into the mainstream web. But that's no reason to give up on formal methods for content engineering alltogether. I can assure you SGML works just fine for the modern web.
Now if you mean that web standardization as a community-driven process has come to an end years ago, and has been taken over by Google et. al. in the form of WHATWG, with folks cheering at taking HTML out of the hands of W3C, I agree this is an unsustainable situation given the importance of HTML (though, personally, I also like HTML5 and what WHATWG has been doing).
The net today has become what the cable box with a modem tried to be, a way to make TV shop a one button interaction.
While the net was all about files/documents the idea may still have had a chance. But with the dot-coms came the money, and with the money came the crooks.
These days even FOSS projects operate with a sharp delineation between user and programmer. And don't use the term power-user within earshot of them...
Correct, it's why nowadays I go out of my way to avoid much of it thus have time for more productive things (it's reason for my cynicism in the reply comment re JS further on hereunder). :-)
> Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
There's a similar phenomenon with Excel. People will put together amazing things with Excel formulas. Sometimes these things are effectively line-of-business applications. But it wouldn't even occur to them to call themselves programmers. They're just "good with Excel".
Many others have also commented on the significance of the 8-bit TV computers booting to a BASIC interpreter rather than something to launch "apps" made by "developers", which I suspect was already part of your exploration.
These days it seems to have morphed into a basic ARM Linux computer (not that i am complaining, especially with the likes of Pi-top making laptop and desktop "cases" for them).