Re: Hippocratic Oath for Webmasters

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

> Yes, I'd say the naming of it is a bit too ... self-inflated.
> Now, if it were called "Good practice recommendations for
> UK FE/HE web sites" instead it would go a lot further, in my
> opinion.

Point taken, but arguably the former would be more "grabby" to users 
than the latter. The technically correct label is not necessarily the 
best for getting people excited and interested in a presentation or when 
they find your "About this site" page.

I don't get the point in your other email that the labelling is 
"elitist". We're saying that some things are better than some other 
things, and trying to define a good outcome of our work, so that is 
"elitist" only in the sense that any effort to codify "quality" is.

Also, the principles there so far don't just apply (or aren't intended 
to apply) to UK web sites, or just to web sites for the educational 
sector.

> 1. I'd like to see the words "clean, structural and semantic
> markup in there", even if it is as an explanation of what is
> meant by "relevant standards". Also, just saying that the HTML
> needs a DOCTYPE doesn't quite get to the heart of it...code that
> validates against published standards.
> "speech browser" ... would it not be better to mention screen
> readers instead?

Good points all.

> 2. Define "meaningful".

"having meaning" rather than "making all meaning explicit".

> are you suggesting
> that, in this example, the URL should be changed to 
> /news/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/URL_ENCODED_TITLE ?

No.

> 7. Should that not be covered by your privacy policy? It does not
> replace it, in any case.

No, it doesn't replace it, but the privacy aspect is part of the user 
experience and so seems to merit inclusion in a statement of good 
practice that's written from the user's point of view.

> 8. Are you going to ensure that this happens throughout EVERYTHING?
> A server completely failing, for instance?

Good point. "Never" is too strong. Can you suggest an alternative form 
of words that isn't off-puttingly legalistic?

> More generally, I'd like to actually see a mention of the word
> "accessible" in there. Also, many rules may benefit from a subtle
> "we will *strive*" rather than absolute promises.
>
> And definitely, cross references to the actual W3C documents and
> any other supporting materials.

More advice that I'll take to heart. I'm glad to have consulted this 
list at an early stage.

> Overall, though, it seems to be a bit of a mixed bag of fairly
> general points combined with some ultra-specific ones. Could it be
> more than 10? Should it be less than 10? Why 10?

No particular attachment to 10. I think lists of ten have a cultural 
grabbiness that 9 or 11 wouldn't have. 10 is just how many we came up 
with in the initial meeting.

-- 
Dr Martin L Poulter    Senior Technical Researcher, ILRT, Bristol, UK
Research interests: Philosophy of belief and Bayesian inductive logic

The full experience: http://www.weird.co.uk/martin/
Community blog: http://www.weird.co.uk/blog/
Politics wiki: http://www.infobomb.org/

Received on Wednesday, 23 November 2005 10:52:49 UTC