Re: QED & Marshall McLuhan

At 05:37 PM 6/10/99 -0400, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>At 10:42 AM 6/10/1999 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>>Yes, everyone should be able to _access_ the information, and
>>there should be a guarantee of _that_, but I cannot stomach the
>>idea that it is _my_ obligation to make _every_ piece of
>>information "understandable" in a way that is obvious to someone
>>with a learning disability.
>
>Kynn, you haven't "accessed" information until you can "understand" it.
>Anything less, isn't "access", it's an approximation. 

Anne, 

Demonstrate, please, how to express the following concept so that a child,
someone with cognitive disabilities, and someone with a low IQ can
understand it sufficiently that you would label it as "accessible", WITHOUT
changing the very specific detail required of a technical specification: 

(the following is a real passage from a book I'm currently working on. It
is *already* prose vs. the EBNF declaration that is the primary resource
for such information)

---

So far, our element declarations have dealt with sub-elements that must
occur; that is, none have been optional, nor have they explicitly been able
to occur more than once. In order to indicate a sub-element's optional or
recurring status, you need to add an occurrence indicator to the element
declaration. Occurrence indicators are single character symbols that appear
immediately after the generic identifier name or sequence of names. For
instance, if we chose to make the nuts in our ice-cream sundae element
optional, we would write: 

<!ELEMENT sundae (icecream, whippedcream, nuts? (fudge | caramel))>

The ? symbol in this declaration indicates that the sub-element is
optional, and may occur zero or 1 times within the parent element. 

---


Until the *how* is demonstrated, the reaction you're going to get from web
developers is "gee, that's well intentioned, but naive/unreasonable". The
reality for this example may be the same as that initial reaction. 

Note that this exercise doesn't even begin to address the issue of why a
child needs to understand occurance indicators within element declarations
in an XML DTD, or why a technical discussion is obligated to make such
information "understandable" by anyone who may come across it. 

Ann

Received on Thursday, 10 June 1999 20:16:49 UTC