On Dec 22, 2007, at 10:21 PM, Jeff Seager wrote: > A few actual quotes from Berners-Lee:
None of those quotes have a lot to do with "user controlled experience," at least not as defined as what people in this field consider interaction and experience. If one is defining being able to see data on various devices, that's about as low a bar for "experience" as it gets, as experience requires interaction. > ... So I'd suggest that the vision of user empowerment and > democratization was there rather early on, Andrei. I don;t think my > interpretation was too far off the mark. There's a vast difference from using XHTML to present dead, passive, non-interactive data on any device to being able to use technology to give people the power to layout their own personal newspaper on a screen while still keeping the thing readable, interactive and otherwise "user empowered." > What's the primary interaction to consider? Isn't it the user's > interaction with information? Yes. That's partly the point. And I mean "interaction," not "reading." > The economies of scale disappear when > we have to build an alternate presentation, so what's the problem > with building a solid core from the start and offering enhancement as > an option, rather than forcing people to opt out of javascript or > Flash or anything else they perceive as superfluous? Because the lowest common denominator with XHTML and the web and the current set of web standards if used as the solid core takes us back a few hundred years with regards to how structured communication works for better human understanding and communication. The newspaper is a basic standard of non-linear structured communication. The current crop of web technologies and standards fall well short of any reasonable mark to reach the structured and non-linear approach that a newspaper provides, which is why designers of online newspapers employ all sorts of tricks to get at the structured part to work in ways that make their content more presentable. Let's not even get into trying to use the web to work like interactive catalogs or enterprise application that manage large, massive data sets. Amazon and eBay have always been the examples of what you get with the lowest common denominator for presenting content. > Should I endure > a "rich" experience just because someone has decided that's better > for me? No one is asking you to. No one is asking you to bother to use the computer, or a newspaper, or a magazine, or a drill or a hammer or any number of products that someone else designed for you either. > Also, the percentage of people who give up because they don't know > *how* to turn off javascript is undocumented. There's a lot that > statistics don't tell us. It doesn't tell us anything until you or someone goes and proves it does. Until then, it's wild speculation. > As I recall, one actual statistic goes something like this: By age > 65, more than half of us will have a disability that prevents us from > working (regardless of our profession or trade). By age 80, more than > 90 percent of us. That's from memory, but it's darned close. > These statistics apply to the U.S., where longevity and health care > are arguably better than some other countries. I'm not sure what the point is. I wear glasses already and have done so since I was 16. If all you are complaining about is small fonts, then that's pretty low on the totem pole of problems we encounter as we grow older. (At least I fear something like diabetes far more than I do having to get stronger glasses.) Technology is getting better, and the real true way of scaling layouts to make them larger and more readable will happen. All I'm saying is don't toss out hundreds of years of good design practice in the interim, or we lose that knowledge to pass on to the next generation. (Try finding new business folks who know how to write a memo these days, for example.) > Screen readers are the mostly likely adaptation for them, if > they seek web access, and screen readers as we know them today are > easily flummoxed by javascript ... unless it's implemented with > accessibility in mind from the start. That's what I advocate. Then you advocate regression instead of progression. People can't have it both ways... Either the web and the browser is going to get more interactive and more non-linear or its not. The uses and purposes of JavaScript will simply get in the way of what you advocate at some point, and that some point is very fast once you decide to use it. The moment it gets interactive and even more non-linear, you are going to have a hard time making it accessible on the front end. I've said this in other threads, the only true way to guarantee accessibility is to make Apple and Microsoft build it into the OS. Preventing or otherwise discouraging things like JavaScript in web applications is both impractical given what people want to do these days and making the request of people who actually don't have the means to guarantee it can happen. Only Apple and Microsoft have that power. Further, what's the entire point of being an "interaction" designer if the technological means for doing such things on a platform like the web browser is actively pushed back by people in the very profession that is supposed to design interaction? Never made any sense to me to be honest. > I'm not saying anybody *must* do anything. I'm just saying it > might be a really good idea to be ready for this, just as you grab an > umbrella on the way out the door when the sky darkens. It might > actually be a very good business decision to build accessibily. Again, if accessibility is what you seek, those people need to work with Apple and Microsoft and have it built into the OS as a core piece. Asking people who design web sites to handle the problem when they have to make their work *more* interactive and *more* non-linear to make progress is not the right path and and simply won't work. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. 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