Who is the audience?

Here's one post-TPAC riff. Take it or leave it.

One theme that was easy to observe at the conference was the pondering
around who those mysterious consumers of what we do are, how to reach
them, and how to reason about them. I heard people speak of Web
Authors and Web Developers and making various distinctions about them.

I heard some folks of arguing that this audience of ours prefers
markup over scripts, and when faced with concrete examples of the
opposite, retort that those are just some script library folk, not the
majority.

It made me think that perhaps pure democracy as means of assessing the
needs of such a vast, enormously uneven (in terms of skill and
influence) audience is severely flawed. And moreover, it's likely
responsible for the sad situation we're in today, where markup is a
rare craft, cutting-edge Web apps are nothing but bootstraps for
loading script, and the actual Web influencers (like jQuery engineers)
actually have to send designated ambassadors into our realm to try and
reason with us.

Something is wrong with this picture.

:DG<

Received on Monday, 7 November 2011 19:52:44 UTC