RE: Structure of deliverables: are we too PC for our own good?

At 01:15 PM 9/9/01 -0700, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>we do NOT have a consensus on the validity of our approach.

It's probably not the group's problem (approach validity) but a sort of 
"handicap" (in the horse-racing sense of extra weight in the saddle's 
pouches) imposed by W3C's chartering and process overhead. Just the idea of 
"normative" on something that won't even be around in a couple of years is 
just plain silly. It's like the "Device Independence" activity dealing so 
much with "devices" that will all be in dumpsters before the ink dries.

To pretend that there's eternal verities (or lofty principles) guiding this 
stuff is to ignore that the entire medium is in its infancy. The principles 
are pretty clearly stated but "normative"? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, were Jonathan's students able to use some part of the Web, how 
will they find that? Will I ever get to quit spelling my surname and trying 
vainly to remember more than one password, etc. Is loss of patience a valid 
"disability" as I mutter to myself and wonder why Amazon.com can recognize 
I've joined their site without my having "logged on", yet AT&T whose 
scientists probably invented much of this can't?

I didn't mean to put the effort down, and the results have been striking, 
but please skip writing abstractions and get into helping those who must 
populate the Web with content how to do that without excluding sensory- and 
age- related, as well as "cognitive", condition-holders. How to set 
priorities? Maybe let the audience decide, I sure can't. It's all Priority 
1 as far as I'm concerned.

--
Love.
EACH UN-INDEXED/ANNOTATED WEB POSTING WE MAKE IS TESTAMENT TO OUR HYPOCRISY

Received on Sunday, 9 September 2001 16:57:07 UTC