Re: Target browsers for web development

1. Definition of "educating": I think Josh put it best in trying to separate
educating about the content or context of the app/site vs. the enabling
technology. Todd talked about the confusion a user had between JS and Java.
Why do they even know these technologies exist. More and more of my users
don't even know what HTML is and to be honest, that's a good thing. How many
people know that MS Word uses a combination of COM components and written in
C++? It just works.

2. Learnability: GREAT point. Learnability to me is NOT about teaching
standards and technology, it is about a UI that has facilitities that enable
easy recall of the system's functions. Again, even if you want to take it to
the extreme case of having to popup a window that tells the user, this
feature means X (click here to never show this window again), that is still
teaching the user about the context of the app, not the technology that
enables the app.

3. Reality vs. Idealism: I don't think this is at issue for us right now. I
think there are ways to let users know information w/o being interruptive
and to me that is key. As I explained in my response to George's TV example,
there is a big difference between having an opening credit of "Broadcast in
High Definition Wide Screen" vs. when a show starts, the show blocks the
screen until you acknowledge that you read it. To me the difference is
between educating vs. advertising, but since a dictionary might come out any
moment I won't focus on terms too much.

In the end folks, technology is not an end-user concern and the more you
expose it the more you are failing your users.

Degrading gracefully though is all well and good, but sometimes b/c of
browser standards what works according to standards in one browser doesn't
work for another. This is especially the case when the browser you are
trying to degrade to i.e. Netscape 4.x doesn't have any standards compliance
at all.

- dave

    --------------------------------------------------------------
     POSTINGS (in plain text): [email protected]
           SUBSCRIPTION CHANGES:  http://lists.syntagm.co.uk
            (or send email to mailto:[email protected])
    --------------------------------------------------------------