[WEB4LIB] Re: 99.9% of web sites obsolete?

[Chris Gray]

On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Jerry Kuntz wrote:

> The article makes it sound like the 90s were the bad old days. IMHO,
> it was also a time when the Web was more democratic and full of
> possibilities. I'm concerned that the trend with standards has been
> towards very much more complex coding--and that affordable editing
> tools have not kept pace. In 1997, a kid with a text editor could
> create a web page (and find a host to serve it). Would the early years
> of the web have been so exciting if content was only able to have been
> developed and published by a trained elite? What are the options now
> for someone to create web pages without extensive training? FrontPage
> at $169.00? Dreamweaver at $399.00? Perhaps this explains why blogging
> has become so popular--it's taking the content back to people, rather
> than professional media producers. I wonder if those whose serve on
> standards committees bother thinking about this, or whether they just
> consider agreement upon a standard--any standard--to be a sufficient
> democratizing tool.

Well, you still can put up a Web page with a text editor and have it look
like any page a kid could put up in 1997 or before that.  It won't look
like a current corporate site with all the bells and whistles, but so
what?  (I'm reminded of Scott McNealy banning PowerPoint presentations at
Sun Microsystems and being immediately rewarded with record breaking
productivity. <http://www.optimlator.com/qod1.htm>)

Before backward compatibility and before standards comes the KISS
principle.  Standards are only worthwhile if they promote the KISS
principle.  There is enormous potential for anything that lowers the bar
to publishing on the Web like blogs and wikis <http://www.wiki.org/>.

Chris Gray
University of Waterloo Library