tags: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

2003

September

2003 Sep 9

retrograde consolidation

A follow-up to my elliptical comments on mass amateurisation(sic). The original browser wars had the indirect effect of pushing back the envelope. While we have rich media such as Flash, what most of us end up publishing is essentially plain text. (OK, it’s technically HTML, and it’s usually Unicode and not ASCII, but you get the picture.) But plain text will always win in terms of portability and in terms of compactness. Which makes me think of other technology that has gone backwards a bit: MIDI ringtones, NASA’s renewed interest in Apollo space capsules.

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