I've had a bit of a love/hate relationship with that dark god, HTML, ever since 1993. Early that spring, I'd been turned on to HyperCard, that crazy Macintosh app that first started to put the fear of hypertext on the common man's mind. I was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately -- HyperCard had been out at least since 1987, and was starting to show itself as a bit long in the tooth even then. Still, I was entranced. I went out and bought a copy of Computer Lib/Dream Machines; I read Vannevar Bush's As We May Think. Hell, I even re-read some of my old Choose Your Own Adventure books, and deconstructed some innocent bystanders.

That summer, some friends and I took a hike over to the Oregon State Library, where the then-guru-in-residence showed us this crazy hot new app from the folks at NCSA ... a little thing called Mosaic. Wow! My mind started to whirl with the possibilities. Unfortunately, us poor folks at Willamette didn't exactly have an X-term hanging about, and NCSA hadn't yet ported Mosaic to any platforms of interest. Mosaic puttered back down to the bottom of my head while I played with other toys.

By fall, Willamette had a new toy -- a new X-term named "twinkie." Mosaic bubbled back up, and I went in search of information on how to use this cool new medium. It wasn't as hard as I thought -- I found the NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML, and within an hour, I'd gotten up to speed. Those first efforts are, in retrospect, pretty darn amusing -- I've come a long way since then. But I was grateful for such a great primer, and impressed that it was well done enough that I could get going so quickly. (As an aside, many of those first efforts are still around, although quite a few them will finally die an honorable death with this long overdue reworking of my corpus.)

However, as I continued to learn more about HTML I realized that, as with any language, there are good ways to use HTML and there are bad ways. In January of 1994 I started to make a list of the bad idioms and simple mistakes I was seeing both in my work and in the work of others. My intention was to create a "lint" program, but what I ended up creating was Composing Good HTML. A longer history of that document can be found in CGH itself. However, one notable further development which CGH led to was the writing of a book: Web Weaving.

All in all, I've spent a fair amount of time mucking about with HTML since then, and -- all in all -- it's been a hell of a ride. In three years, I've watched the explosion of a totally new medium for publishing bereft of all former ties to physical creation and distribution problems. The global press is something even more new and exciting than it was when Johannes Gutenberg changed the world in the 15th century.