Re: Amateurs was Re: XBL in document fragments

On Monday, October 25, 2004, 10:17:26 AM, Jonathan wrote:

JC> However could you please expand on this reply* which might seem highly
JC> offensive to some.

Jonathon,

First, please chill a little before re-reading Jons comment in its
original context.

JC> I imagine that you wouldn't wish to be perceived as considering that
JC> pre-literate population has no right, desire or ability to publish.
JC> Yet it is evidently clear that at the present time they don't have the
JC> appropriate tools and mechanisms.
JC> perhaps you could describe how you personally, or Adobe are engaging
JC> with the community of 'amateurs' and the pre-literate to meet their 
JC> needs.

This is a strawman argument. You attempt to join two disparate
communities, not-very-good programmers and the pre-literate, then
pretend Jon was primarily addressing, even attacking, the second group.

JC> people who are pre-literate face many problems engaging with the web.

Yes they do; note that nothing Jon said had any bearing on this group.

JC> SVG and sXBL have the potential to help, however this means everyone,
JC> and I mean everyone engaging with those less able than themselves, in a
JC> particular field or endeavour.

You miss the entire point. Previously, using scripting in SVG meant that
one person coded something up, and only people at the same level of
coding skill could re-use, modify, or integrate this for a different
purpose.

sXBL allows components to be created which are robust and self
contained. Furthermore it allows those components to automatically bind
to declarative markup, and to be used in combination. Two different
programmers can create components, without ever talking to each other or
planning their designs together, and a third person - a non programmer,
certainly not a professional programmer - can take those components and
use them *in combination* without necessarily understanding how they work
under the hood.

They just have to know that to make scrollbars you group things inside
a fo:scrollregion and to make things draggable yuo as i:draggable, and
so on.

Indeed, since people don't have to know how to use them, it implies that
even authoring tools could allow these components to be added i a drag
and drop manner.

All of that is a benefit and makes these sorts of facilities available at a
lower knowledge level. Assuming the components are sufficiently robust;
Jon was arguing against facilities what would make for less robust
components and thus, components that would have been harder to use, more
puzzling to use in combination, required greater programming knowledge
to make work.

None of which has anything to do with people who can't read. Instead,
you took one word out of context 'amateur' and proceeded to blow up.


JC> *On 29 Sep 2004, at 17:59, Jon Ferraiolo wrote:

JC> I think it is much more important to provide a robust facility for 
JC> professional developers who create robust components with all of the
JC> appropriate mutation event handlers to take care of things like 
JC> insertion and deletion of LI elements than it is to create an 
JC> "easy-to-use" mechanism which might allow amateurs to create components
JC> which do not take care of insertion and deletion and thus are not 
JC> robust.





-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Monday, 25 October 2004 16:39:10 UTC