--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > As far as a device that you can comfortably and > safely use in the tub is > concerned, I don't think that paper will be the > delivery method of the > future. ======================== Its estimated that 40% of the US adult population is non-literate, which means they dont read books or newspapers. This has been accompanied by a rapid decline in the ability of college students to write a half-way decent paragraph in English. The California State College system, the largest in the nation, takes almost any applicant who got through high-school degree with half-way decent grades. But about 40% of its first year students are not capable of doing college-level work, and thus their first year is dominated by remedial classes in English, Math and other subjects they should have mastered in high school.
These declines all coincide with the growth of the internet, and the shift from obtaining knowledge from paper books to learning from feeble snippets of on-line text. The blogosphere, dominated by those who are at least competent in the English language, consists mainly of opinions unsupported by any factual basis. When you read tomes from the 1990s extolling the promise of hypertext to change the way people think and use information, (I recommend the Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook by Berk and Devlin), you begin to realize that its promise was still-born. The hypertext pioneers envisioned a rich panoply of link types that would create hypertexts which were true searchable mazes Frame Technology, beginning in FrameMaker 4, added a rich variety of hypertext link types which would have realized that original vision. When Adobe took over FrameMaker, it could have carried out that vision by implementing all of the FrameMaker link types in PDF. It failed to do so. And so, the HTML standard, with only the most primitive hypertext link type, became the standard. There was some hope that the XML standard would have rich linking capabilities. It added a few additional link types, but nowhere near enough to realize the original promise of hypertext. The result is that most online help documents are shovelware. I wrote an article about that, Thoughts About On-Line Help, about 6 years ago. Its still available at: http://www.microtype.com/resources/articles/Oldocs_DE.pdf Although I would probably add some additional concepts and ideas if I wrote that article today, I still stand by most of whats stated there. In particular, I stand by my statements in that article about the many advantages of paper books (or PDFs which faithfully replicate the format and layout of well-designed paper books). Getting back to what I state in the first two paragraphs above, I maintain that the ability to acquire in-depth knowledge of a subject is a discipline which is difficult to master. And I have no doubt that well-written, well-organized paper books, particularly on difficult subjects, will continue to be the best way to acquire real, in-depth knowledge of a subject, and subsequently serve its owner as a valuable reference source. If the internet (and other vehicles of on-line content) continues to serve mainly to encourage an undiscipplined pseudo-approach to real learning, it will remain a major cause of rising non-literacy. ======== _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
