Re: A summary of key points on dynamically generated web pages

I concur entirely with the arguments that Charles has been so capably
developing on this subject. If the user of an electronic document is to
have the utmost flexibility in transforming it according to her or his
specific needs, then several requirements need to be met. These include
the preservation of relevant structural and semantic distinctions, thereby
enabling appropriate conventions to be employed in the target medium as
representing what would, in the visual context be conveyed by layout and
presentational conventions. The same conditions are a prerequisite to
interactive browsing and navigation. It would be a retrograde step to
advocate an approach which, by tayloring content on the server side,
attempts to prejudge the user's needs (or range of potential needs from
which a choice is offered), and in so doing, distributes the document in a
form which is inherently presentational rather than semantically rich.

While I agree that a substantial proportion of web content today falls
short of the stated goals, the best solution is to move technology and
practice forward so as to facilitate the generation of broadly accessible,
flexible, convertible content that conveys suitable semantic and
structural properties than to transfer control (and hence assumptions as
to users' needs) to the server, in other words to the content creator.

This is not to minimise the importance of proxy services, or specialised
server applications that may be needed when transmitting documents to
handheld or other devices in which the available computing resources are
limited. Server-side content generation is an invaluable, indeed
fundamental technique underlying the web today, and as such it must be
fully supported and developed. What I object to is the use of such
technology to transform content in accordance with the needs of particular
classes of users, particularly where the latter are identified in terms of
disability.

Received on Monday, 22 November 1999 22:24:15 UTC