Context Labs Chief Technology Officer, Gavin Nicol, was recently featured in the podcast Command_Line Heroes: A Language for the Web, Season 7, Episode 3. The episode focused on HTML and its evolution. HTML gave everyone a foundation for building and viewing the World Wide Web, shaping the internet. In 1995, its standardization led to dominance, while its simplicity helped it spread and grow.
Gavin shared his experience with HTML development & standardization, and Unicode. In the episode, he highlights the need to standardize the quickly growing language. He also expressed the importance of making HTML work for everybody and to ensure the organization structure represents us all:
“And it became kind-of a mission for me to make that easy for non-native speakers, because I firmly believe that if you force everyone to speak in English, you force everyone to sort-of think in English and that’s a very sad thing, because you end up losing the culture that is associated with the language… There’s a thing called Conway’s law, and it’s, kind-of-like, systems tend to evolve to represent the organizational structures that created them.”
Since 1995, HTML has greatly evolved. However, there still seems to be an inherent bias for English speakers. We need to continue to work on making the web language a platform for everyone to use.
Gavin is now instrumental in the development of our Immutably™ platform. Through our platform, we provide customers with Asset Grade Data (AGD): data that is so highly pedigreed, provenanced, proofed, auditable, and immutable that it becomes beyond reproach. We aim to source and secure ground truth data and make it Asset-Grade. The AGD that our platform provides will set a foundation for ESG data that enterprises, regulatory partners, and investors can use and trust in their climate-aligned and sustainable business models.
Command Line Heroes is an original podcast from RedHat, the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions.
Listen to the episode here:
Command_Line Heroes: Season 7, Episode 3: A Language for the Web
