At 11:59 09/01/04 -0500, Andrew Macdonald wrote:
As the discussion for web sites based on standards seems to be
falling into the usual web based battle about why should we use standards
It certainly wasn't part of my argument. My point was if you want to control
the output of your content to different media it is better to do this by
holding
it all in a database not in a tagged document. Sean thought this couldn't
be done. I assure him it can. The last 30 large-scale websites I have
been involved with have all been built this way and the same databases
have been used for print output, CD-ROMs, touch screen displays and,
with appropriate XML filters, data exchange with other applications and
organisations.
Discussion of standards, though, has a deeper significance. This seems
to dominate in Web development in periods when creativity has dried up.
E-commerce salesmen in finance and insurance a few years ago were
using metaphors of shanty town building of websites being replaced by
a recognised building code in an attempt to woo conservative institutions
to reinvest in the latest Sun boxes and Oracle software: we've no new
ideas so buy some new kit in the meantime. I feel quite despondent
about museums and Web use at the moment: I can't remember when I
last saw a genuinely new idea implemented and things we talked about
at conferences 5 or 6 years ago are just being trotted out time and time
again: cauld kale rehet, which I trust is a phrase familiar to someone
called Macdonald !
The most glaring deficiency, to me, is a general failure to use the Web
to create genuine educational experiences in museum websites and to
reach new audiences or even existing audiences in a way with which
they feel comfortable. Of course all institutions have different missions
and remits, and I don't pretend to know that of the Brooklyn Museum
of Art. The last US census, though, showed 28.1 million people in that
country speak Spanish in the home, only slightly more than half claimed
fluent English and 2.2m of these Spanish speakers live in NYC. Should
engaging this audience not be a higher priority than catering for those
who choose to use text-only Lynx browsers? I bet there are a few
people around the world who would be interested in reading about the
museum's Egyptian collection in a language other than English too.
And, if you do intend to produce a multilingual website, creation and
maintenance is an awful lot easier if all your content is in a database
with web-pages built on the fly.
Douglas
The Highland Clearances
http://www.theclearances.org
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