On Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:43:03 +0000 Ralph Eastwood <tcmreastw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This means we could, conceivably design a consistent interface to > "types" of "information-outlets". The most markup for the text we > could probably need is something like Markdown? A point to discuss > here; we want to avoid layouting in the content but maintain > semantics. > > There are many benefits to this: the underlying layer could still be a > file-system based interface and you could have a standard layout that > could mean you could have your own custom client to access if you so > choose. Perhaps there could be a 'layouting' language, that would > provide the intended views that should appear on a screen for websites > that need a significantly different method of interaction to the user. > As a nice side-effect, this would help users that need accessibility > as then there are so much less that can go wrong with screen reading > devices and fallbacks that can always work. As nice as this all sounds, this is far away from reality, making you sound more or less like Richard Stallman philosophing about the free software revolution now having been waiting 25 years to happen. Working in an advertising agency myself, I know the underlying issue with the semantic web: It looks great on the paper but in reality, people really want to have full freedom in how their sites are structured. As a company, same as in software development, usually not the best solution but the fastest (= cheapest in the short-term) one is desired. Having to work on giant HTML-shipwrecks every day and how many hours I am paid to do that, I see the importance of clean semantics, however, companies don't learn easily, let alone customers who don't know the matter (all websites look the same to them in the end). To really introduce changes to the web, it would have to be carried out by a conglomerate of big corporations at best behind the major browsers pushing a common agenda forward (starting in the codebases). As soon as the major browsers support a new type of markup-language, which could be much easier to write and develop with, a real change could be made. However, philosophing about a new way won't help much as long as it hasn't hit the browsers themselves. Moving away from XML would be a blessing! It's what I'd consider the switch from Web 2.0 to 3.0. Cheers FRIGN -- FRIGN <d...@frign.de>
