Re: DogFood (and inline/block constraints)

> Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
> > Because the intellectual capacities of readers of literature are
> > typically limited,
>
> Could you cite any authority to support this quite
> remarkable assertion ?
>
> Philip TAYLOR

You can cite me, if you need any authority ;o)
That is not just my personal observation, working at a university.
I never tried to test it systematically, but it should be simple to 
test this assertion experimentally with texts about modern physics 
or mathematics with a random choice of readers, 
should still work, even if they have a general basic education
in these fields. My observation is based on such not systematic
'experiments' like diploma-thesis, Phd-thesis, scientific papers,
as author, co-author and corrector.
I think it is applicable to other fields too - both the limitation
of intellectual capacities of authors and readers is the interesting
part on writing good literature (scientic of other stuff too) - and
authors need any help they can get, to write what they mean and
communicate to the readers, what they really intented to write,
especially if authors are experts on their field of work, but not on
writing itself - I think, this is one typical case for content in the
internet too - the other typical case of course is, that they are
neither experts on the theme nor on writing itself ;o)
And mixed formats like XHTML+MathML+SVG can be very helpful 
for authors, if those formats are improved in some areas. If 
the content model and element (name)s are choosen and are
available in such a way, that they help authors to structure 
thoughts to something useful.

Received on Friday, 4 January 2008 16:02:00 UTC