- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2003 07:58:47 +0000 (GMT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
> Are there any formal criteria here? Are there any studies on markup > language usability that could be employed? I think even just an informal look at how people write HTML and Word documents would show that the language needs to be unstructured and presentational! The average person (including the average graduate from good universities - both arts and sciences) appears to have extreme difficulty in formalising structure in a document. Grammar is considered an academic subject, even though most people can speak their own language reasonably grammatically. I think usability will have to come from authoring tools. The language can only help by having very very few concepts and (if this is possible at all) making it very difficult to abuse it presentationally (tools for mass market use would abuse it in that way, given the chance). I think usability may be the biggest challenge, and may be an impossible problem.
Received on Monday, 3 November 2003 02:58:54 UTC