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Discussion on: I Tried to Create HTML Alternative, Here's What Happened...

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Elmar • Edited

Great innovation and change comes from rethinking status quo.
I usually put myself in a theoretical parallel universe and start to think, how the better parallel universe would look like. There, technology would have been invented more intelligently from the start.

I noticed, that constraints of the existing technology are often caused by lack of thought of the authors. And many people will think within these constraints after they learn the technology.

That means, I don't see the problem in thinking of and experimenting with replacements for existing technology. Questioning and eventually changing the system is required, same for politics and economics. I think that HTML has usability problems which should be fixed. HTML makes it easy to lose overview.

Big "however" however! In order to really replace existing standards, it needs to be original in concept, it needs to solve new problems (not those which are solved already) and must be an original idea. That's why almost all new programming languages are useless because they don't get to the point of innovation, they don't find solutions for general but small specific or little personal problems, they don't rethink programming, although there is huge potential.

Reinvention just tries to "correct" existing technology. The improvement is too negligable.

Your effort looks astonishing but it does not feel like an innovation. It could make development easier by writing and reading less code but it looks like "HTML6". It does not solve new problems or like a new paradigm.

I'd like to have a directly mutable GUI technology with WYSIWYG editing mode (for customization and extension) which navigates and edits like a markdown text editor and a help mode where tutorial macros – selected for a searchable use case – can assist you with explanation (plus navigational tips), an outline of the use case and automatic navigation between the single steps. The underlying text representation of the GUI would just serve for editing, by default not even being visible, and for loading/saving GUIs from/to files easily.

I don't know, what the future will give us. Dreams like the ones of mine might be unrealistic from the point of presence but without ideas the future has no perspective.