>My own feeling is of great excitement about the development of Netscape's
>extensions to HTML,and a feeling that their efforts will result in
>wonderful improvements to the language. Netscape-enhanced HTML documents
>can still be written with any text editor, graphics, video and sound files
>are in standard formats, the enhancements are documented in
>publicly-accessible sites, and the Netscape viewer is free, at least for
>users in non-profit and educational institutions.

I must completely agree.  Why should we base on Netscape Communications
Corporation for trying their damndest to make HTML capable of more
sophisticated layouts?  Isn't that what we all want?  The fact that
Netscape is forcing
the standard along means faster paced changes that serve the Web authoring
community and the Web user community.  Making everyone else play catch-up
is not the sign of an evil empire forming, but the sign of a hungry company
trying to establish its position in this new world.  Give Netscape a couple
years... THEN it will be the evil empire.


>It seems to me that we are witnessing the rapid evolution of a
>communication form that is filling a niche in the information landscape. If
>museums want visitors to their web sites, they will have to follow the
>migration.

YES!  We are overhauling our Web site to be more Netscape compliant and
we feel no shame.  Netscape makes a lot of stuff very easy that used
to be very hard... In biology, one of the common metaphors for evolution
is "running to stand still".  The idea is that organisms live in a
constantly degrading environment... other organisms are constantly finding
new and better adaptive peaks.  You either run to KEEP UP or fall behind.
That metaphor holds doubly true for information evolution... and if you
want to watch evolution actually happen (which is not exactly easy to do in
biological systems) watch the computer world.  It is amazing.  We are
DEFINETLY running to stand still.

Cheers,

Robert Guralnick | Department of Integrative Biology | Museum of Paleontology
University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley, CA 94720 | (510) 643-9746