Re: the discussion on how to measure conformance

At 11:27 AM 10/22/00 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>:  I think William likes RDF.  I just get that feeling.

I can't imagine what gave you that idea.

At the Device Independent Authoring Workshop I was shocked to find a 
deep-seated elitism among "authors" when I claimed that before very long 
almost everyone would realize that the Web is a read/write medium and that 
author/user would be more of an "and" than an "or" proposition. Many of 
them thought this was not only not true but not even desirable. The early 
computer prophets (in particular Norbert Weiner) understood that these were 
very powerful tools but they thought they would always be restricted to 
guys with degrees, probably wearing white lab coats. The proliferation of 
affordable computer power has changed the old social order and even a 
dropout like me has access to arguably the most important tool ever devised.

With the imminent popularization of RDF (there are starting to be real 
applications) I would like to add that 
authoring=browsing=indexing=authoring= (that's supposed to be a circle!) 
and that by doing any of those functions you are almost automagically doing 
all of them! The urge to index will bind us all into a real Web. As Tim 
Berners-Lee says, it's not a tree it's a Web.

What's this got to do with GL, you ask? As the guidelines become more 
inclusive they will hopefully include requirements to provide at least 
minimal "who/when" and possibly "how/why" metadata so that we can truly be 
"all in this together."

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Sunday, 22 October 2000 17:01:37 UTC