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On 28 Jun 2004, at 8:48 AM, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
This is an interesting thread in as much as it touches on best practice... ...I have been thinking lately of offering users multiple stylesheets to allow them to customise pages to suit their equipement, interests, and/or disabilities. Thus users with larger screens might like to see more options on a menu; or visually impaired users might prefer their links to be underlined.
This touches on a key point -- when we develop applications that are open to the world, we don't know who will be using them, in what context, and at what time. Web browsers extend far beyond the mainstream MSIE/Mozilla/Opera world, users can be from anywhere and from any background (look at me, for example), and projects may live on for years after the development stops.
I know this is a hard thing for a few IT people (and some major corporations) to swallow, but we can't expect the world to conform to what we've got on our desks anymore (I wish we could, it would make my job much easier). I've had a number of faculty and students ask about accessing Web-based materials and applications on mobile phones, PDAs, and embedded systems in television set-top boxes, and through screen readers for the visually impaired. Browsers seem to be embedded into nearly everything these days, and who knows what will be next? With that in mind, should we develop academic tools from a restricted perspective of only one browser on one operating system? Before there were robust standards, it was difficult to argue otherwise. Today, it is difficult to support an argument for browser-specific development when there are standards to address much of what required platform- or browser-specific functionality (and I know funding agencies and governments are starting to pay attention to that fact).
There are trade-offs and I admit that standards, especially new ones, can get in the way of functionality. The important thing to remember, however, is that by converging toward standards, materials and applications will stand a greater chance of reaching a broader audience over a longer period of time with, hopefully, lower support costs and a better chance of being supported in the future.
Personally, I want to see as many scholarly projects survive over time as possible. By adopting mature standards when appropriate, the initial overhead in implementing them will pay dividends in the long-term. In other words, someone in my role can find resources to keep them going long after the funding stops and the development ends.
Later, Chad -------------- Chad J. Kainz cjkainz@uchicago.edu | 773-702-9945 | FAX 773-834-2983
Senior Director, NSIT Academic Technologies, The University of Chicago http://intech.uchicago.edu Vice-Chair, IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee http://ltsc.ieee.org