Re: An alternative strategy

I think Job underestimates the size of the middle group, who could live
with CSS as a stylesheet mechanism.  A large percentage of the material
on the Web still comes from academic sources of one sort or another, for
instance.

I'm also not sure that he adequately addresses the interests of
information consumers, who have a strong interest (even if most of them
don't know it yet) in being able to control, in a standard way, the
presentation of the information they use.  I'm also not sure CSS serves
that interest really well (I believe most end users would say that their
preference should override the author's style specification, by
default). In any case, end users are likely to be much more concerned
with the degree of control they have and how that control is presented
to them, which is only partially a factor of how it's encoded in the
document and/or stylesheet.

A agree with the bulk of what Job says, though.  We really need
SGML+DSSSL tools for serious "publishing"-grade content.

To make that happen, we need to get viewing tools for those technologies
available at nominal cost (in practical terms, free).  Perhaps one of
the major SGML ISVs could invest in Netscape and IE plug-ins to handle
SGML and DSSSL.

Actually, there's kind of an interesting dynamic here for the major
broowser vendors, too.  While they have aimed largely at features that
attract the end-user, in a vicious battle for desktop-share, their
actual income supposedly comes from corporate users aiming at supporting
internal uses that would probably appreciate the ability to define
purpose-specific SGML DTDs and formatting.  I don't know how or who
would sell that notion to the people who make their resource-allocation
decisions...

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Tuesday, 30 April 1996 11:27:29 UTC