Re: 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

The advantage of only linking is that it forces one to consider relevance.
Embedding encourages the use of decorative material, whereas out of line
material has to be of real relevance, otherwise people will not follow the
links.

> who cannot easily understand a plain text page to have an idea of the main
> topics of that page.

If they can only get an idea of the topics, they may well be in the wrong
place.  There is still a strong case for presenting completely different
material to people with different intellectual levels or background 
knowledge, and, in many cases different organisations may be best suited
to communicating at the different levels.  It can even be dangerous to
get a partial understanding (there are many examples, but, for example
CPR applied inappropriately can kill).

> technologies in the area of the semantic Web that we should expect to use in

I haven't read the source documents on the semantic web, but from what has
been presented by its proponents on the various mailing lists, I think it
will be considered strictly for academics by commercial web site authors;
most govermental site authors follow commercial site practice rather than
thinking from first principles.  Remember that commercial web sites are
advertising, and modern advertising has very little to do with communicating
information.

> 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.

The main long term constraint is not so much technology as the cost of
entry in terms of assembling a multi-disciplinary team to create a small
web site.  Given that I treat accessibility as being more than just 
accessibility for physically and mentally disabled, there is a danger that
you will be denying accessibility to publish.

Received on Sunday, 5 August 2001 14:13:25 UTC