On Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:43:03 +0000
Ralph Eastwood <tcmreastwood_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> This means we could, conceivably design a consistent interface to
> "types" of "information-outlets". The most markup for the text we
> could probably need is something like Markdown? A point to discuss
> here; we want to avoid layouting in the content but maintain
> semantics.
>
> There are many benefits to this: the underlying layer could still be a
> file-system based interface and you could have a standard layout that
> could mean you could have your own custom client to access if you so
> choose. Perhaps there could be a 'layouting' language, that would
> provide the intended views that should appear on a screen for websites
> that need a significantly different method of interaction to the user.
> As a nice side-effect, this would help users that need accessibility
> as then there are so much less that can go wrong with screen reading
> devices and fallbacks that can always work.
As nice as this all sounds, this is far away from reality, making you
sound more or less like Richard Stallman philosophing about the free
software revolution now having been waiting 25 years to happen.
Working in an advertising agency myself, I know the underlying issue
with the semantic web: It looks great on the paper but in reality,
people really want to have full freedom in how their sites are
structured.
As a company, same as in software development, usually not the
best solution but the fastest (= cheapest in the short-term) one
is desired. Having to work on giant HTML-shipwrecks every day and
how many hours I am paid to do that, I see the importance of clean
semantics, however, companies don't learn easily, let alone customers
who don't know the matter (all websites look the same to them in the
end).
To really introduce changes to the web, it would have to be carried
out by a conglomerate of big corporations at best behind the major
browsers pushing a common agenda forward (starting in the codebases).
As soon as the major browsers support a new type of markup-language,
which could be much easier to write and develop with, a real change
could be made.
However, philosophing about a new way won't help much as long as it
hasn't hit the browsers themselves.
Moving away from XML would be a blessing! It's what I'd consider
the switch from Web 2.0 to 3.0.
Cheers
FRIGN
--
FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Received on Wed Oct 29 2014 - 20:00:40 CET