Douglas MacKenzie wrote:
At 13:29 08/01/04 -0500, Sean Redmond wrote:
One thing people can do is to stop using Internet Explorer
exclusively. Look at your site with Opera, Mozilla, or Lynx.
<SNIP> The dominance of IE and Microsoft monoculture tends to distort
how (X)HTML has been designed to work in many different media. When
you start to appreciate the multiplicity of contexts in which your web
pages might be viewed, it's easier to rethink how your pages are built
and your site structured.
There are some good reasons for using XHTML and many even better ones
for using CSS but 'multiplicity of contexts' is a red herring. Whether
we like
it or not, IE is dominant. Looking at the web stats for theClearances
over
the last period, we had 660254 accesses by IE browsers against 2955 by
Opera and 5756 by Mozilla. In fact., we had more accesses by one
particular Web Spider than all the 'minority' browsers combined.
This is sort of what I was talking about. Never mind that HTML, XHTML
and XML are designed to be platform-agnostic. We won't take advantage of
that because IE is dominant. Netscape used to be dominant. That changed
very quickly. Now IE is dominant but *that* could change very quickly.
Being standards-compliant also doesn't mean XHTML and CSS, those are
just current, useful standards. HTML is a standard but most sites aren't
even valid HTML, they're just whatever FrontPage spat out.
And "context" and "platform" doesn't mean just IE vs. Mozilla or Windows
vs. Mac, I mean screen vs. print (You can easily, with an XSLT
stylesheet, turn a valid HTML document into a beautiful PDF, ready for
printing and handing out at the admissions desk -- how much time would
that save?). I mean desktop vs. handheld or cellphone (How quickly have
cellphones taken over our lives. How long will it be before people
routinely look for something to do by browsing the web on their
cellphones?) I mean a person scanning your webpage vs a computer
indexing your site for your institution's archives (and being able to
distinguish exhibition titles from the titles of works of art because
distinguished them in your HTML with a CLASS attribute).
Also, Web spiders are part of the multiplicity of contexts. A page that
is well designed so that a screen reader for a blind visitor gets right
to the meat of the text rather than wading through a sea of navigation
links first also makes it easier for a web spider to judge what the page
is about.
Improving accessibility is great; reaching more people with your museum
website and its cultural message is even better but, if that is the aim,
providing an Estonian or Xhosa language version of the content is likely
to be more relevant than recoding in XHTML.
Well, speakers of Estonian and Xhosa have a better chance of learning
English than a blind person does of being able to read a computer
screen--not that I wouldn't love to have Estonians and Xhosa
translations of our website. Also, your Estonian and Xhosa speakers may
be less likely to use Windows, and therefore IE. See, for instance a
recent article from the Christian Science Monitor
<http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1204/p14s02-stct.html> on the rise of
Linux outside the US, or the spat over the lack of Hebrew support for
Office and IE on Macintosh that led Israel to cancel all of its
governmental contracts with Microsoft.
SR
--
Sean Redmond <[email protected]>
Brooklyn Museum of Art Information Systems
718.501.6571
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