"HTML and the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that understands its formats. This has to be one of the worst ideas since MSDOS. HTML is what happens when physicists decide to play with computers."
Kay later points to the internet as an example of software that can grow instead of being constructed. And I know that the web is technically not the internet but I wonder if the internet would have grown the way it did without HTML and the browser. There's a lot written about all the better ways that could have been but it's hard to downplay the beauty of what has essentially become the largest unstructured program in history.
Alan Kay is a huge proponent of capital P Personal Computing. Meaning that anyone should be able to edit programs, edit how text gets displayed on your screen, etc.
HTML is a language to structure text with, that's perfectly fine to him. The problem is that the browser decides what that text should look like to you. Not only its aesthetics, but also how and where it gets displayed. If you want to visit webpages in a painting program ro find images, why not?
This makes a lot more sense if you watch one of his smalltalk demos, he draws a wheel and a car in a paint-like program, then tells the car to rotate as much as the wheel is rotated. He can rotate the wheel with his mouse.
Then he paints a pedal, and if clicked on it accelerates the car etc...
This is not a programming environment, but an operatjng system, you're free to make all your programs do everything
HTML, and the web stack by extension, have their faults, but the advent of the web should've been a humbling experience for Alan Kay. I deeply respect Alan Kay for his achievements, but he appears to have been stuck in "object land" for a few decades now. For example, he seems to hate the idea of "simple data" for philosophical reasons (see [1]), but it's undeniable that "data" is not a bad idea at all and we use it proficuously every day. The fact that a physicist succeeded in creating a worldwide hypertext, and the best computer scientists didn't, should be telling. There is a lesson here somewhere, just dismissing the web as the work of amateurs is missing the mark. I love Alan, but sometimes, he is his own worst enemy.
