RE: The devices-universal websites "myth" and the semantic web

To be fair to Kai, he's doing a good job of highlighting some of the challenges we face. If he truly believed that it was all negative, he wouldn't be bothering to participate. He would have by now abandoned technology and taken up a career in oil painting or gardening. I'm sure that in the spirit of a Best Practices group, Kai will not only be able to highlight examples of poor practice, but also point to examples where he believes good practice is being demonstrated.

Single source, multi-device authoring is possible, but it does require the author to do a little more effort. Not as much as having to author for each device separately, as some commercial solutions can demonstrate. The challenge is to minimise the amount of additional work needed by the author, so that the amount of motivation needed to convince the author to do this work is reduced, and thereby increase the amount of Web content that becomes device independent. The nirvana case, where the amount of authoring effort is similar to the current effort required for the single-channel fixed Web, I believe is not possible. There just isn't enough (semantic) information in a traditional Web page to ensure it is adaptable.

I think a lot of the examples that Kai highlights are related to the limitations (or errors) of the user agent, which naturally puts a limitation on the adaptation possibilities. I'm sure these issues are

Just my 2c worth...

---Rotan Hanrahan.
(Chair MWI DDWG)

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrea Trasatti [mailto:atrasatti@gmail.com]
Sent: 17 June 2005 10:47
To: public-bpwg@w3.org
Subject: Re: The devices-universal websites "myth" and the semantic web



On 6/16/05, Kai Hendry <hendry@iki.fi> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 01:20:11PM +0300, Antti Martikainen wrote:
> > > 1.2) Can I use a single structure ?
> > > -----------------------------------
> > No, not really, if you truly want to adapt content to the capabilities
> > of a device..
> 
> In another words. Yes! Unless you want your site to become device
> dependent, inconsistent, broken etc.
> 
> > CSS apparently can be used for doing part of the job, but considering
> > the overall architecture of a large-scale commercial site, it is a
> > really bad solution. CSS is supposed to be about visualisation. Mapping
> > content to different kinds of devices is something else. And as was said,
> > it's bad to deliver additional content for small devices..
> 
> Some "content" on a commercial site is really just "about visualisation"
> too. Anyway I've found CSS so badly supported on series 40 Nokia devices
> that this technique isn't really justified. Anyway the CSS doesn't stop
> the content being downloaded. So if you expensively downloaded all the
> content, why not see it all?!
> 
> Again media types are also badly supported in mobiles. Try your mobile
> here:
> http://media.dabase.com/

As always you are negative and say bad things about everything.
What you say is most of the times a great idea in threory, but I
wonder how many real sites you have seen put in place what you say and
how many you realized yourself.


-- 

Andrea Trasatti
atrasatti@gmail.com
Experimental Blog: http://trasatti.blogspot.com

Received on Friday, 17 June 2005 10:53:57 UTC