Re: belittling designers, two kinds of accessibility

> No offense, but this sounds like historical revisionism to me.
> Certainly nobody was seriously calling gopher "the web" before HTTP,

The name probably postdates gopher, although it is used in the original
CERN hypertext: <http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal>.
Note, this document was being served with an incorrect media type yesterday
(text/plain).  I looks like a correct type is application/msword.  I've
emailed web-human.

I would argue that the concept that it was naming does not.  I'd accept
that a gopher web is not as homogenous as an HTML web, as the links can
only originate from menus, which can't contain content (the current web
permits HTML (and PDF) content to originate links, but not GIF, JPEG,
or .WAV, an HTML wrapper must act as their proxy - NB presentationally
embedded content, like IMG was not in the original specification).

The real point, though, is that web is sometimes used to mean the
mesh of physical communication links that form the internet, and, as
an adjective, it is used to refer to anything with an HTML component
(probably accessible over the internet) whether or not it contains links
outside itself.

That leads to people assuming that HTML is always the right tool for
internet sites, when I'd argue that its design aims are at conflict
with the requirements of most commercial sites, although supportive
of accessibility.

I'd argue that the real new speak is the use of web to mean a self
contained, single site (or partial site), logical document, in the Front
Page terminology.

Received on Tuesday, 24 October 2000 02:49:10 UTC