and still more...
"But thinking back to HTML 1.0, I don't think there was any presentation-based markup. And the first browsers weren't graphical."
The first web browser was graphical. It was a NeXTStep application written by Tim Berners-Lee.
"But if we're trying to achieve a goal like a well-linked, richly tagged hypertext on the internet, you'd think that there would be more push to the layoutless model."
(I don't think he meant layoutless, but I could be wrong!)
Layout is essential in many ways. If it wasn't important CSS wouldn't exist. I don't think hypertext or hyperlinking in HTML suffers because of tables of lack of semantic structure, but it sure could if you're talking XML.
Written on February 17, 2002