Re: web standards project article

In my former life as a police officer, I was called round to a 
University professors house. Despite being a highly intelligent man, he 
said to me "I didn't realise the police worked at nights".
This man would have been perfectly capable of realising that it would be 
impossible for the police to operate on a 9-5 basis, but he simply 
hadn't thought about it.
One of the main problems standards advocacy faces is that the majority 
of Web designers have a method of creating acceptable Web sites and 
simply haven't thought any further on the topic. As can be seen from the 
above example, this doesn't necessarily reflect their intelligence or 
ability to understand. Part of the standards advocacy program must 
therefore attempt to encourage deeper thought, it is simply not enough 
to place usable information onto the web and expect people to flock to it.

A second problem - one which I think particularly applies to this 
thread, is that of depth. The degree of accuracy required in a 
conversation depends on the circumstances and the participants. If 
someone asks my age in conversation, giving my full age in hours and 
minutes, while technically correct and more accurate, is virtually 
useless as information. The person asking my age is unlikely to go to 
the effort of converting the data into a format which is meaningful to 
them and thus is left non the wiser and less likely to ask further 
questions. It is then possible the imagine the person asking other 
people and receiving less accurate, but usable information.

I feel there is a requirement for more usable information about 
standards and that it must come from the W3C so as to avoid this loss of 
accuracy.

Received on Saturday, 30 October 2004 08:43:12 UTC