Re: The Conflicting Notions of Ease of Use and Need for Authoring Tools

> [this is almost off-topic in www-style, please prefer private answer, thx]
>
> Guys, I am sorry to play the devil's advocate, but I have read this
> kind of opinion for the first time 16 years ago while working on wysiwyg SGML
> editors. Nothing has changed. And I bet it won't change for 99% of authors.
> Not because they're not smart enough to get the semantic-ouhlala-it-s-hot
> fever, but because they don't care. Don't tell my dad he has to care about
> semantics when he wants to push online a page with the photos of his grand-
> children. Wake up guys; nobody needs to integrate e = (m.v.v)/2 to follow
> the parabolic trajectory of an object thrown in the air.
>
> The only option here is Intuitive UI. Make it semantic, don't tell it. And
> please, please, don't ask average users to understand our awful geeks' mess.
>
> </Daniel>

Though I believe that this definately belongs in www-style and
www-html. CSS relies heavily on the concept of class-based styling.
Those classes are, in the case of HTML, semantic. CSS revolves around
the idea of styling semantic information, but is rarely used that way,
especially since most people could care about semantics as you say.

In my mind the semantic web is something that should be of primary
concern for the architects of the web and not the authors of it. I
think that the file systems of the future which will store not only
raw data, but structured data will give the semantic web its future.
Rather than simply adding a name, the authoring tool will be able to
search the corperate directory for information about that person and
add semantic information. The same should be true of locations and
businesses. Authors should only have to worry about content, not
classification because as I've found out many times, even the best of
us are bad at classification because classification is a personal
thing.

Received on Tuesday, 4 January 2005 18:35:30 UTC