Re: fear of "invisible metadata"

At 15:01 -0500 UTC, on 2007-06-25, Dan Connolly wrote:

[...]

> It doesn't seem necessary for us to agree whether these are
> invisible metadata or not...

Well, I get the impression it's a key factor :)

It matters in the sense that the more 'visible' certain markup is to authors,
the more likely they'll 'get' it and use it. At the same time, that
'visibility' is entirely dependant on the authoring environment authors use,
so in that sense it is indeed not about visibility at all. Talking  a bit
about those two viewpoints (pun intended) can help people on all sides of the
debate better understand each other.

Btw, if there seems enough of a positive vibe about a container tag for
images, I will try to scrape together some time to supply the group with a
proposal, documented and wikified and all. Right now it's just an idea that
slowly developed during this discussion. I didn't see it coming ;)

[...]

> Well, perhaps the current thread has some value, but I think
> "fear" is a poor label for "difficulty of authoring" [...]
> I'd much rather be able to tell from the subject which section
> of which document(s) we're talking about...

Sure. But changing the Subject header seems problematic on this list. When I
did that a couple of times in previous threads, it only resulted in the same
topic being discussed under both the new and the old Subject header. Maybe
because others care less about Subject headers, or simply because with so
many of us, by the time a new Subject has reached the list, others have
already replied under the old Subject, or they've initiated their own Subject
change. Whatever the reason, it only worsened the problem. So for this list I
deprecated my usual Subject changing behaviour. It seems to work better to
stick to whatever the original Subject was.

(What I find more problematic is the large amount of 'top-posted' messages
that require you to read the quoted text from the bottom up to be able to
understand the new text. Most of those take too much time to decipher so they
go straight into the trash here.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 10:49:01 UTC