I remember, or perhaps dreamed up, that the name ‘Hotmail’ (hot stuff circa 1996 when it was the first free webmail with a 3MB mailbox, I believe) was chosen not only because of its naively descriptive yet Poochy-cool name, but also a pun on HTML. They even joked that other alternatives like ‘HutMall’ or ‘HatMill’ were decided against.
In the early days, when first introduced to HTML I asked my tutor in earnest if it was an abbreviation of Hotmail. Much mocking ensued.
Man, to think I had a pre-Microsoft Hotmail account, and still have a pre-Google Youtube account.
Age beckons.
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Up until she got a Google account when getting an Android phone a couple years ago, my mother thought that the G in Gmail stood for Government and you could only get a Gmail account if you worked for the government.
Those Gmen and their confounded Gmail!
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Oh god. The early HTML editors were so amazingly horrible. The most stomach turning were the ones that tried to do exact layouts with HTML by using a thousand nested tables on every page to lay out every element, because separating content and presentation is for dweebs. Back then, if you had a table the browser had to internally render the whole thing before it could be displayed on the screen, so those pages would sit for ages and ages while you trickled a billion <td> tags over your modem then pegged the CPU for several minutes trying to render it.
Nowadays they just abuse position: fixed in CSS and/or just make their page one big PDF.
The real early HTML editors were just fine - vi and emacs, or Notepad in a pinch. Using them strongly motivated you to write clear, simple HTML instead of ugly hackery.
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They still are doing a pretty good job. No other tool provides you with better control of the results.
I personally like Notepad++, but the only real reason why I favor it over Notepad/WordPad/vi/ed is that it has built-in syntax highlighting and has tabbed editing. Otherwise, I’d still use plain old notepad, or whatever came with the linux distro I’m using. Probably Gedit, since I’m too crotchety and inflexible to get used to the look and feel of KDE, or really anything other than a GNOME 2 styled interface. In addition to windows of course, which has the unfair advantage of being what nearly every business uses day-to-day.
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