Douglas MacKenzie said: > 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.
No, I'm saying that if you are going to spend time and money creating web pages you should use a format that might have a little extra life and value that "Best viewed with IE 5.0 or greater." I wouldn't tell our designers to stop using Quark and InDesign. What are you advocating? Distributing Word documents? > 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. That's why CSS has media types, so if you want web pages that print cleanly you define CSS rules for print media in addition to screen media. A machine based-search tool is going to ignore the CSS, and that's why you want well structured markup. I'm not saying that you should send XHTML pages of your exhibition catalogs to the printing press. > 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. This is another topic entirely. Of course you'd be better off with everything in well-structured database, but that's like asking if you'd rather have a book or a librarian. If you're exporting it for the web you're better off exporting it as well-structured XHTML and formatting it with CSS. > 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. I don't think I was advocating top gloss as the most important part of developing a web site. I was saying is that if you start with a good XHTML foundation you can get a good return on that effort in multiple media through CSS and XSL. > 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? Again this is apples and oranges. But if I am exporting data from a database, neither do I want have to create an export format for every device of the month, when most would do perfectly well with HTML or XML. > (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%. So, like I was saying, they may be less likely to use IE. In this case about 8% less likely. > 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. I just hope people in developing countries don't waste their limited resources on Microsoft licenses, so I want to create websites that don't (even accidentally) require IE. SR -- Sean Redmond Brooklyn Museum of Art --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
