HoTMetaL

» see softquad.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Correctness was never the thing anybody around me wanted from a web page. A page was good if it loaded and looked roughly right in the browser on the machine you were sitting at, and every browser of that era would swallow whatever you fed it, closing your tags for you in silence. HoTMetaL was software built on the opposite belief. an editor whose selling point is that it will not let you be wrong is selling a virtue that has to already matter to you, and in Turkey in the years I was learning this stuff, it did not.

SoftQuad was a Toronto company, founded in 1984 by Yuri Rubinsky and two others, and it had spent the pre-web decade on SGML, which is the standard the web's markup was carved out of. Author/Editor, from 1988, was the first specialized SGML editing application anybody shipped. so when HTML arrived, SoftQuad already owned the hard part. HoTMetaL came out in 1994 as the first commercial HTML authoring product, and underneath the new name it was that same engine reading a much smaller grammar.

It shipped in two shapes, which is why so many people touched it: HoTMetaL Free, which cost nothing and traveled through the same channels shareware did, and HoTMetaL Pro, which cost money and got the attention. PC Magazine gave it an Editors' Choice in 1995. It ran on the Mac up to version 3 and then went Windows only, which is roughly the point where the product stops leading and starts defending.

The last real release was HoTMetaL PRO 6.0 in June 2000. Corel announced it was buying SoftQuad on 7 August 2001 for about 37 million dollars in stock, the shareholders approved it on 14 March 2002, and the deal closed the next day. Corel wanted XMetaL, the XML editor. HoTMetaL went along in the box and was never released again, so the date on this stone is a corporate date, because nobody ever bothered to announce the product's own ending.

~ the case file ~

~ what it insisted on ~

The signature feature was the Tags-On view. You saw your page roughly as it would render, with small icons sitting inline where every tag opened and closed, so the structure of the document stayed visible while you worked on the look of it. That is a genuinely good idea, and a version of it survives today inside Adobe InDesign's XML module, which is a strange afterlife for a 1994 web tool.

The other half of the inheritance was less loved. Because it came from an SGML engine, HoTMetaL treated your file as a document that either conformed to a grammar or did not, and the early versions were famously unwilling to work with markup that failed. that reputation cost it more users than any missing feature ever did. people wanted a tool that would help them finish. they got one that wanted to be right first.

~ the funny part ~

HoTMetaL was correct about everything and it did not matter at all. Valid markup did become an actual value, years later, through XHTML and the standards campaigns and eventually through browsers that stopped guessing quite so generously. the tools that carried that argument to ordinary people were free ones, and by then the company that had made the argument first was a division of Corel.

Meanwhile the web was won by editors that forgave you. FrontPage generated markup so bad it became a running joke and shipped on millions of machines regardless, because it let a person with no idea what a tag was put a page online on a wednesday afternoon. That is the trade the whole category was making, and HoTMetaL is the one product that refused to make it.

~ what got buried with it ~

SoftQuad itself is the larger loss. A Toronto company that was doing structured document editing before the web existed, that shipped the first commercial tool for the web's own format, and that then got taken apart in pieces. The SGML products were sold off in 1998 and the company itself was absorbed in 2002. XMetaL kept moving after that, from Corel to Blast Radius and on to JustSystems by 2004. nothing in that chain was a failure exactly. it just ends with the name gone.

What I keep coming back to is the two-word version of the pitch. HoTMetaL knew the rules and would say so. Every editor that followed decided, correctly for the market and wrongly for the web, that the customer would rather not hear it.

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