Re: Updating 2.4, re-revised

Matt,

	Thanks for clarifying this. I've had this sniggling urge in the back of my
head that this is not an issue that can be adequately addressed with a
"thou shalt not".  We can affect the presentations that businesses make
with customers, but we can't do much about the back room business
decisions... It's hard to imagine that a web designer is responsible when
real life distracts a user! How long should an item be carried as sold when
the user slumped over his computer and died before he finished buying his
new Dell system? What a scenario in Fiduciary law! Is the dead user
required to pay for the ordered computer since he kept it out of
sellability for whatever time span (til his ISP turned off)?

I made a slide program in Powerpoint over the weekend, to share a set of 36
pictures taken in the school. I added a sentence of text to each picture,
and set the slides to change every four seconds. Ample time for adults to
read the caption. Great, for showing to the principal, the curriculum
specialist, and other adults. But when I showed to program to the kids, who
skipped reading the text and wanted to identify their cousins, siblings and
friends in each picture, I needed to have a longer time span ... 

	As you suggested, static pages, and pages within a a "presentation", need
to be available to both run un-manned, as well as manually, to meet all
needs. Static pages' purpose is to serve the user ...

	Interactive pages have to meet needs other than solely accommodating the
user. Online tests (anticipated by 2002-2003 in Virginia) may need to be
scored differently if the user uses them timed or untimed. Plus all the
business needs you cite. 

					Anne

			

	

	

	


At 09:31 AM 5/31/01 -0700, Matt May wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Adam Victor Reed" <areed2@calstatela.edu>
>
>> And it is not difficult to design bypass
>> technologies that will still meet legitimate security and economic
>> constraints.
>
>I disagree. Timeouts such as those present in Dell's site (along with those
>at my former companies) are based on hard business rules on the back end.
>Expedia needs you to lock in your reservation so it can relay that request
>to the computerized reservation system it gets its data from. (And it uses
>meta refreshes to keep the HTTP connection alive while it contacts the slow
>pathetic creature.) HomeGrocer and Webvan needed to accurately manage
>delivery trucks and merchandise in the best possible manner. Resource
>management is critical in e-commerce.
>
>Ticketmaster is an extreme example: they require transactions to be
>completed in 5 minutes, or they release reserved tickets back into the pool.
>This isn't something they can change trivially, because they're using the
>same reservation system in stores nationwide. And auctions all have timeouts
>that can't be shifted.
>
>It should be noted that the only sites where this presents an economic
>barrier to the content provider are e-commerce sites, and it has been
>suggested before that web content and web applications (such as those found
>in e-com) have different rules. This is one rule that should definitely be
>applied to static content, but cannot be applied to many web applications.
>
>-
>m
>
>
Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

http://www.erols.com/stevepem
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2001 17:52:46 UTC