- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 09:57:32 +0300
- To: Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net>
- Cc: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>, John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>, public-html@w3.org
On Jun 6, 2009, at 00:42, Shelley Powers wrote: > In the IRC discussion yesterday, several references were made to it > not being "web scale". We assume by "web scale" that it must appear > in some portion of the web. I don't know, I'm not sure what "web > scale" is. I think there a two main aspects to a feature working at "Web scale": 1) Is it used enough to solve the problem it is supposed to solve often enough? 2) Is it used correctly enough to have a positive overall impact? Suppose there's a problem and a prospective solution. Also suppose that the prospective solution "works" in the lab in the sense that it has been possible to construct a demo in the lab where the solution solves the problem. For now, let's also suppose that whenever the solution is applied, users are better off than if the solution hadn't been applied. Given the suppositions so far, any application of the solution anywhere makes someone somewhere better off. However, the feature may still be a failure on the "Web scale" if it doesn't solve enough of the occurrences of the problem as faced by users. Thus, to assess whether the feature works on the "Web scale" the frequency of application of the solution on pages that would exhibit the problem needs to be high enough that users feel that the problem actually gets solved often enough. (It's hard to come up with a hard number for what "often enough" is. Also note that it matters how often users would encounter the problem, so popular sites matter more than a random uninteresting page that has been unmaintained the 1990s.) For example, the solution could be shown to solve the problem perfectly on intranets when applied by expert consultants but still fail on the "Web scale" if people browsing the Web would virtually always find the problem unsolved because the solution is too hard for casual Web authors to apply. The assumption that whenever the solution is applied users are better off is not a correct assumption, though, which brings us to the second aspect of working on the Web scale. In practice, "solutions" can be abused so that users would be better off if there had been no attempt to apply the solution compared to the solution having been misapplied. For example, if the user follows a long description link only to find a larger JPEG image instead of a textual description, the user's time has been wasted and the user is worse off compared to no purported long description having been offered. For the second aspect of a solution working of the "Web scale", the feature has to be mostly applied correctly when it is applied at all. That is, a solution can solve the problem in the lab or in the hands of expert consultants on an intranet and still fail on the Web scale if the less apt Web authors misapply it so often that the information channel provided by the solution becomes a sewer of bogus data to such a degree that the expected value of paying attention to the information channel is so low (possibly negative) that it's not enough to pay back the effort of inspecting the information channel. (For example, if the expected payoff of checking a long description is lower than "cost" of the effort of checking the long description.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 8 June 2009 06:58:15 UTC