Re: Aie it's HUGE

At 01:07 PM 12/7/98 -0500, Chris Kreussling wrote:
>Is the casual or beginning web author interested in learning even HTML?
Probably not; they just want to "put up a Web page." They're going to use a
visual authoring tool.

Bad assumption. Many of these users have given up on the visual
tools,specifically because they don't live up to their billing. Relegating
these users to the whims of tool makers isn't appropriate. Right now the
tools can't handle this (and I'm not yet convinced any tool should FORCE
something on it's user...suggest and provide, yes, but FORCE, no). 

I currently have 108 students in my Intro to HTML 4.0 course (HWG Online
Education, http://www.hwg.org/services/classes/ ). Barely a handful are
anything *but* the casual or beginning web author. The vast majority of the
introductions start out "I started using FrontPage <or insert visual tool
name here>, and realized it didn't perform well, so I'm now here to learn
how to do it "right"".

Just as the Web needs to be accessible to all users, the accessibility
guidelines should be information that is digestable by all authors. 

Ann

Received on Monday, 7 December 1998 22:25:09 UTC