Re: xhtml2 and user groups

> - "academic" and
> - "commercial" users.

I think the real split is between research and operational, on
one side, and marketing, on the other.  (Some of the other replies
point out the existence of the marketing side in the academic world -
and this is probably particularly true of the newer universities
in the UK, which are primarily businesses.)

However, particularly in the commercial world one has to account for
the fact that a large part of the intended content of a web page is often
not the overt content, but a subliminal message (in my view they often
have little useful overt content), and the over product is often not the
real product; the real product might be something more like the status
of a department manager (as user of high tech or as author of pages).
Status is often a particularly important part of the product when the
real product is not really new.

When looking at free commercial sites apparently offering information,
one has to realise that their real product is readers of advertisements,
not the information.

Again, particularly for the more visible parts of the web, machine
parsability of the information content is an undesirable feature, from
a marketing point of view, as it means that it is easy to strip out the
advertising, and the subliminal messages.

I think you also missed out the thin client application programs that
basically use the web browser to avoid the need to install and maintain
individual programs on user machines, by dynamically loading them as 
scripting, etc.  These can vary across the functional versus marketing
driven spectrum (and the in the latter case, they aim is often to make
them behave like a locally installed Windows application would behave).
I'd say that was another specialisation.

Received on Friday, 17 January 2003 02:02:34 UTC