Honest question: apart from nerds, what reason do we have for valuing 'View Source'?
I mean, you can't 'View Source' anything of the computer the browser is running on, or the browser itself.
I mean, you can't 'View Source' anything of the computer the browser is running on, or the browser itself.
Alos the web is not just for nerds! HTML is a language that lots of everyday people can write now - it is empowering.
"View Source" is not the only way to start on your way to nerddom, but it is, or at least was at some point in time, an important one.
Every resource I consume today is either in HTML or PDF form.
Two other things that helped push me into the nerd side when I was a kid:
- QBasic shipping with the OS on my first computer
- Video games that shipped with map editors (Abuse, StarCraft, Unreal Tournament - the latter actually gave access to most of the source code through it)
I'm in favour of everything that exposes the inner workings of computers. Software, in particular, shouldn't be a black box, even if 99% of the time everyone (developers included) treat it as such.
Technology is becoming easier to use, but more sophisticated and more of a blackbox so much harder to understand or replicate. Higher barriers to entry in the market, more power to existing gatekeepers. Fewer and fewer people will understand enough to wield influence and those people will be employed by big companies for tons of money. It shifts the balance of power and only a select few people can expect to have a big impact.
Simple example - imagine Google was as easy to replicate as it was in the very beginning. If you disliked the direction ads & privacy are heading, maybe 4-5 people could make their own search engine just as good with more privacy rights and less creepy tracking. Now it will take 100 people and billions of dollars to even get close...
barriers to entry go up => resources required to compete with existing players go way up => existing players get more power => existing players abuse power. Ahh the business cycle.
Says you:-)
When I'm running SLIME in emacs talking to SBCL, I can type M-. to look up definitions of SLIME elisp, Swank Lisp and so forth, all the way into emacs's C core and the SBCL internals (more Lisp code). This sort of capability has existed since the 80s at least, and maybe even further back.
Yes, yes, I know: I sound like a broken record, extolling the capabilities dynamic systems give one. But they're awesome, and they've been around forever, and they're well-tested, and they perform well enough. It really is a shame the tech world keeps on chasing the new & shiny (and half-baked) instead of improving the wonderful stuff we've had for decades.
"How can they possibly stand to work on this when it's all jumbled together on one line??"
I would manually pretty-print so I could actually read what was going on, and now I still like to output tidier HTML when I can, even if no one is ever going to see it.