At 17:10 08/01/04 -0500, Sean Redmond wrote:
dominant. Netscape used to be dominant. That changed very quickly. Now IE is dominant but *that* could change very quickly.
Wouldn't put my own money on it though
And "context" and "platform" doesn't mean just IE vs. Mozilla or Windows vs. Mac, I mean screen vs. print <SNIP>
Which really gets to the crux of it. We both probably agree that reusability of museum data is important, not least economically. Your argument seems to be that this is best achieved by freezing the output in a Web page standard. I would argue (to the point of jumping up and down until frothing at the mouth) that what is best for a desktop screen is not necessarily the best format for the printed page, a handheld device or a machine-based search tool. One might also want to vary the output on any given device according to the audience (curator, tourist, research student, kindergartner etc) but all based on the same source data. If this is all in a database, and every form of output is generated from this, according to the best formatting rules for the particular device and audience (rather than the current flavour of Web coding), it is much easier to add new options and take advantage of new interfaces or devices. Yes, CSSs are very useful when generating web pages on the fly from a database but it is the underlying structure which is important, not the top gloss. 5 years down the line, after your putative death of Microsoft, would you rather be managing the migration of your data from an Access DB to a Linux-based mySQL database or developing a parser to convert all the data tags in a markup language? (I've done both: the first in minutes; the second in years - and that was just the committee meetings). The database approach also makes the production of multilingual websites an awful lot easier.
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.
I did mean this as a question of priorities (and a wish to do more on our own websites and a wonderment that big-budget US museum websites seem to ignore non-English speakers) but, as you raise the point, http://www.eisa.ee/stats.php, with a preponderance of visitors from Estonian domains, shows IE usage at 87%. Xhosa I picked because there was a project to translate Mozilla and other Open Source programs into this and other South African languages but I haven't seen any study on what difference this has made, if any. The papers I have seen in e.g. the Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, do show that the conceptual background to web use is quite different to that in the north. Douglas The Highland Clearances http://www.theclearances.org
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