RE: Suggestion for this Editorial Note

I don't see the ideology Joe refers to, but I agree that scoping this
requirement is very difficult.

On Sun, 2 May 2004, Joe Clark wrote:

>This one's going to spiral out of control if you're not careful. It
>already carries a strong whiff of anti-design ideology.
>"Resource" is surely better than page, though.

Hmm. It's better in that it encompasses things like VoiceXML dialogues
(albeit not very precisely) but it isn't as clear as "page" in situations
where peopla are accustomed to think of pages. I don't think it is better,
but don't think it's worse, either.

For what it's worth, I do think "media" is a bad suggestion - it is generally
understood as an abstract noun either referring to the things that are used
to communicate, in general (such as "mixed media", "traditional media as
compared to the web...") or as a collective term for those involved in
journalism and entertainment (such as "the portrayal of australians and
canadians by the media").

>> The old phrasing only talked about consistent behavior between pages, but
>> why narrow it to that? Within a page, you do not want the same interactive
>> element associatiated with different functionality either.
>
>You could have two or three links to a homepage using different forms.

You could. In many cases I think this appraoch is not a good way to make
things better for users. But the problem of having something that appears to
be the same and links to two or three different destinations strikes me as
worse.

On the positive side, if we embrace the kind of dictionary-lookup and
re-modelling approaches that the semantic web can provide, it might be
relatively easy for designers to build things which have both of the types of
variation I just described, and provide easy means for people who are just
trying to get work done to turn it off and see things in a simpler way
(beyond basic stuff like styling, which I would imagine is already obvious to
people on this list).

>Besides, we often talk about alternatives in accessibility.

Yes, and I think we talk too little about the reality that people who are
working with incosistent alternative versions of the same thing have trouble
working together. The late Len Kasday used to talk about this (but then he
had to actually solve the problem for a large, real-world application, and
did so).

cheers

Chaals

Received on Sunday, 2 May 2004 15:15:00 UTC