Re: Promotion of XHTML

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Brant Langer Gurganus wrote:

> The problems lie in human nature and a little with Microsoft, but
> Microsoft certainly is not at fault.  They are simply making a
> product that their customers want so the problem lies more in human
> nature.

I disagree. I do not think customers _want_ "wrong" (e.g., table-based
or whatever) design. Most customers do not even know what *ML really
is. They want an easy-to-use tool to create nice-looking Web pages. It
was FrontPage authors decision on how to address that customer need
technically. Thus, we can say that

    - FrontPage authors have chosen the wrong technical solution
      (i.e., we believe there are ways to produce
      the "right" markup from markup-unaware user inputs)

    - and/or markup itself makes it impossible or impractical
      to produce the "right" markup from markup-unaware user inputs)

> People think that "coding" is a geek thing.

And it certainly is! An ideal human-oriented interface should not use
computer-oriented codes.

> The mission is to change that, especially for markup languages such
> as HTML/XHTML where you are telling what you mean or CSS where you
> tell what you want it to look like.

I disagree that we should focus on making coding more popular. I do
not think it is the right direction to go, given human nature. For
example, this e-mail thread uses English to exchange ideas; we would
not go too far if we had to use computer code for that. If we assume
that "Web designers" are not a small elite group of people but
virtually everybody with Internet access, then making them code is
wrong and will not work as long as others can provide "easier"
alternatives (like FrontPage does).

Alex.

-- 
                            | HTTP performance - Web Polygraph benchmark
www.measurement-factory.com | HTTP compliance+ - Co-Advisor test suite
                            | all of the above - PolyBox appliance

Received on Monday, 30 December 2002 18:27:30 UTC