- From: Wayne Myers-Education <wayne.myers@bbc.co.uk>
- Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 15:38:23 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Anne, To respond: > The web is probably no longer what was originally > envisioned, but the > original vision was limited and didn't take into account either the > mushrooming of bandwidth and technology, or the popularity > that the web has > gained. Exactly what is limiting about a vision of a system of documents that is independent of the kit used to view them? And the mushrooming of bandwidth on which planet are you talking about? Here in the UK, I am going to be stuck with a 56K modem for some considerable time to come, and I know that there are many many people around the world who connect to the internet at still lower speeds. Fortunately, the original vision of the web is not limited to a specific level of bandwidth. Your vision of what the web might become, frankly, is limited to a certain minimum level of bandwidth, below which, there is no access at all for anyone. Thanks but no thanks. And anyway, that ain't the web. > At some time in the years to come, the "original" > concept of the > web will go away and the "horseless carriage" as a toy of the > privileged > will be gone ... it's almost there already! Having large amounts of bandwidth *is* currently only for the privileged, and while this remains the case, the original concept of the web is here to stay. Thankfully. As for the horseless carriage analogy, now that we have so many horseless carriages running around on the roads we have serious consequent problems due to congestion and pollution. I wouldn't take the analogy too far, but I'd point out that the average speed for vehicles on the road in London, where I live, is the same today as it was 100 years ago, due to congestion and despite the fact that we 'all' have cars - in fact precisely because we 'all' have cars - and they get in each others' way. Similiarly, if everyone had a massive bandwidth connection to the net it is not clear that this would speed stuff up much by itself, since the backbone of the net too would have to see a concomitant bandwidth increase of gargantuan proportions to handle the vastly inflated overall volume of traffic that would be the likely result. If we all had home pages one megabyte in size (ouch), I suspect it would be just as annoyingly long a wait to download on a fast connection as it is today with 100K home pages (ouch) over 56K modems. I'm not sure of the exact maths but suspect it isn't good. Meanwhile, textfiles are small and lean and multi-media isn't. And thus will it forever be. > But I cannot say that any one of them came to the web > expecting to cherish > "documents" ... Should they be sent back to tv just because > the originators > of the web didn't envision they would be here? Perhaps > purists can argue > so, but these people are too real to me for those arguments > to have much > flavor. I'm sorry, Anne, but this argument sounds absurd to me. It is as if you have been given a fish and are complaining because it is not a bicycle. No-one is sending anyone back to tv. No-one is asking anyone to cherish documents. No-one is accusing anyone of not being real. But the web is still the web - a device-independent document collection. And a large collection of putative universally understandable multi-media documents is a large collection of putative universally understandable multi-media documents - and not the web. Crack the problem of device-independent multi-media and you may be onto something - SMIL may have part of the answer here - but it's still not going to change what the web is. That fish is still a fish, even if imaginative folks like ourselves can close our eyes and imagine wheels and a chain on it. The best bicycles - and I am being wholly serious - are not based on fish. Similarly, the bicycle here - the vision of device-independent multi-media universally understandable by all, ought not be based on the fish that is web, but should be built as a bicycle from the ground up. Hope this make sense. Cheers etc., Wayne This e-mail, and any attachment, is confidential. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system, do not use or disclose the information in any way, and notify me immediately. The contents of this message may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC, unless specifically stated.
Received on Friday, 20 October 2000 10:38:54 UTC