RE: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria

Ann wrote:
Joel, new schools cropping up online cannot ignore their 
responsibility to contribute to content, but I'd put money on the fact that 
although they may be happy to link up "free" content to their courses, they 
will not make their courses available for "free", but will lock it up 
behind a customer password .... shame, shame!

Joel:
I agree 100%, but I don't think we should rule out the ability to link to
existing content. I think that some sites, like National Geographic,
consider their 'free' stuff to be great advertising. When freely available
images or video presentations from that site are embedded or linked into the
content, it provides a means of drawing users to that site, which increases
visitation for that site. That in and of itself may be undersirable, but it
would be hard to beat National Geographic's quality photos and film footage
(check our their live "bear cam").

The question of content origination isn't really debatable by us, I don't
think, but should sit in the lap of the folks creating content. I'm merely
pointing out we shouldn't rule out "linking to" as a solution to providing
non-text content. Though this brings its own set of problems (taking user
away from your site, maybe the server linked to is down, maybe the content
isn't accessible, etc...), linking to existing content is part of why we
have the web - the world's biggest network of resources.

Joel


Joel Sanda 
Product Manager
-------------------------------------------------------www.eCollege.com
eCollege
joels@ecollege.com
> p. 303.873.7400 x3021
> f.  303.632.1721 


-----Original Message-----
From: Anne Pemberton [mailto:apembert@erols.com]
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 4:39 AM
To: Joel Sanda; 'Charles McCathieNevile '
Cc: ''David Woolley ' '; ''w3c-wai-gl@w3.org ' '
Subject: RE: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria


Joel,

         Yes, coming up with all the content you need to teach a course 
online well, is expensive. It isn't any less expensive because it's going 
on the web. Yes, your clients can link to existing content on the web, and 
they certainly should do so, but it cannot and should not take the place of 
developing their own content as well. Remember that all the existing 
content was created by SOMEONE, and they are entitled to some return on 
their time if the content is being used by an e-Learning institution 
charging for the course.

         Joel, new schools cropping up online cannot ignore their 
responsibility to contribute to content, but I'd put money on the fact that 
although they may be happy to link up "free" content to their courses, they 
will not make their courses available for "free", but will lock it up 
behind a customer password .... shame, shame!

                                         Anne

At 10:26 PM 8/5/01 -0600, Joel Sanda wrote:
>Would that mean dropping the linking criteria from  3.4 as it's now
written?
>That's tough, I think, for a number of reasons:
>
>1. "Coming up" with text content is expensive. Adding additional non-text
>content elements will mean a steep increase in production costs - from
>product development through testing and maintenance.
>2. Why create content if good examples already exist? For example: I'm not
>going to create a visual map to my place of business if I can have one done
>my mapquest and add that to my site.
>
>I don't mean "only" linking - but giving designers and writers the
>opportunity to use appropriate and available existing content, linked in to
>their site, 3.4 becomes much more realistic.
>
>In the eLearning industry supplying content for instructors is gaining
>acceptance rapidly. Providing content from the publishers who have
>traditionally supplied only text books, but now supply interactive
tutorials
>and the normally expected graphics in textbooks means such content is
>available - if at a cost. For the non-corporate environment there are
>several "knowledge sites" on the Internet that provide a lot of freely
>available content fitting 3.4's current requirements. While copyrighted,
the
>content can be linked to from a site and in some cases included in the site
>with appropriate copyright mechanisms.
>
>Joel
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Charles McCathieNevile
>To: Joel Sanda
>Cc: 'David Woolley '; 'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org '
>Sent: 8/5/2001 8:33 AM
>Subject: linking? RE: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria
>
>The problem with only linking to the content is that fails to achieve
>the
>purpose of having the content there in the first place - to enable
>someone
>who cannot easily understand a plain text page to have an idea of the
>main
>topics of that page.
>
>I recognise that there are concerns such as copyright and trademarking,
>and
>in some areas (like where I live) of bandwidth. There are emerging
>technologies in the area of the semantic Web that we should expect to
>use in
>the medium term (several years before I imagine it being deployed in
>browsers
>that have been spread into schools for example) which will provide much
>easier techniques for doing this.
>
>In the meantime, we are still struggling to get the principles in an
>agreed
>explanation, so we may find the technology overtakes us in development
>pace.
>Without agreed principles, or even well-expressed ones that are there as
>straw-man proposals, we are several steps away from being ready to
>address
>concerns of whether implementation details are so important as to negate
>the
>principle.
>
>(But I think we are making some progress, which is encouraging <grin/>)
>
>cheers
>
>Charles

Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

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

Received on Monday, 6 August 2001 10:55:55 UTC