David,
my apologies as it seems that once again my comments lack some clarity.
where are the easy-to-use tools?
Ubuntu and Gnome are hardly mainstream...
the most significant issue is that no open source project outside
possibly wikipedia is truly popular.
NB wikipedia is not an application or tool.
My concern is that because the process does not include users, it is
difficult for their needs to be met.
regards
Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessibility Consultant on Media Literacy and the Internet
in many cases developers:
have little or no understanding of a 'public' audience.
actively refrain from user testing.
These two points can be summarised as "open-source developers don't
care about
usability." And this demonstrably isn't true.
Different tools are designed for different audiences; emacs, for
example, is
intended to be usable by developers - and it is. Similarly, Ubuntu,
GNOME and
other systems that _are_ intended for regular end-users have clearly
seen a
great deal of usability testing.
encourage feature creep
Do you have any evidence that you can port to to demonstrate this?
design to impress their peers....
You say this as if this is a bad thing!
in some sense consumerism at least gives the end user some authority.
To a degree, but it heavily depends on there being a free market with
a number
of competing alternatives.
I'm not an economist, but it appears that, in computing, free markets
generally
cannot form if the interfaces used for data interchange are closed
and/or
proprietary; in such markets, one provider will eventually tend to
dominate all
of the others.
For example:
Operating systems: MS Windows tends to dominate (because nothing
else can run
Windows applications, as the ABIs/APIs are myriad and not fully
documented);
Office productivity suites: MS Office tends to dominate (because
nothing else
can read/write the proprietary file formats that Office uses.)
To contrast:
Web browsers: There are many web-browsers: Seamonkey, Firefox, Internet
Explorer, Safari, Konqueror, Galeon, Lynx etc. (because the
interfaces that
such applications must support are well-documented.)
Web servers: lighttpd, Apache, Nginx, IIS etc. (because the
interfaces that
such servers must support are well-documented.)
.. and so forth. If there is a free market, then the consumer has
influence.
Note that in the case of the BBC iPlayer and other similar services
from other
broadcasters, the interfaces are not fully documented - and this is
considered a
feature!
as you may know, the web specifications created by W3C are far more
potent than the mere iplayer.
I don't think I understand - how (and why?) are you comparing the W3C
interface
specifications and guidelines, which exist to ensure interoperability
between
different implementations, and the BBC's iPlayer, which is just one
application?
The issues are similar though there are
more companies and corporations engaged in the project....
Than which project? The W3C? There have certainly been many more
companies and
corporations involved in the W3C specification development process
than that of
the iPlayer!
Cheers,
David
--
David McBride <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
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