Re: xhtml2 and user groups

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 04:06:42PM +0100, Veith Risak wrote:
> Many detailed pros and cons are discussed, but I think there are (at least) 
> two user (author-) groups with quite different needs:
> 
> - "academic" and
> - "commercial" users.
> 
> "Academic users" are interested in clearly structured documents, with high 
> temporal stability (think of reviewed documents of highest quality of 
> content, which can be cited for a long time, ...
[...]
> "Commercial users" are much more interested in presentation aspects, the look
> and feel for readers, interaction aspects, security, ....

This is a misleading way to label the divisions. I am from academia, but
I'd like a style attribute.

The concerns you describe as "commercial" become important when one is
programming dynamic data-driven web applications.

I mentioned creating XHTML from XSLT transformations in a prior message.
One of our (academic) organization's interests is in preserving
accessibilty while providing a visual presentation that will
satisfy management and marketing people. One way to do this (which 
we've been looking at but haven't implemented) is do generate different
web pages on the fly based User-Agent sniffing and/or human-selected
preferences. This also applies to things like content delivery to 
cell phones and other mobile devices.

In this context, I might want to use a rather sparse, structural XHTML 
dialect as storage medium, and a _different_ mix of XHTML + CSS as a 
delivery medium. One size does not (yet) fit all.

I suppose that some sufficiently rich document plus stylesheet
might convey everything to a sufficently smart client with lots
of bandwidth, but this isn't the only reasonable way to operate.

-- 
    Albert Lunde          Albert-Lunde@northwestern.edu (new address)
                          Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu (old address)

Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 15:04:27 UTC