RE: Dinosaurs

At 18:38 22/03/00 -0500, Kali Woodbridge wrote:
>Oh dear--
>
>Steve and Ted are probably right.
>
>But I still think your tools are just that. Tools. They need
>intelligent use to design usable sites, effectively
>communicate concepts, sell product, teach, etc.

I'll vote on your side Kali :-)

Let's look closer at the example of word processing.  Someone touted 
Microsoft Word as the "ideal" word processing program, and I'm not going to 
debate that.  However just because someone can pick up a copy of Word and 
print out a couple of pages that look somewhat how they'd like them to look 
doesn't qualify them as a word processor.

Our word processing staff here absolutely despair of academic staff 
producing draft documents - they (the academics generally) have no concept 
of "Styles", prefering to toolbar formating options.  Another mis-use of 
the program is using 4 tabs and 20 spaces just to indent a heading or 
paragraph.  The word processing staff believe it is faster to rekey the 
data than to correct the mistakes.

This sounds very similar to arguments we here daily - "it took me ___ 
hours/days to fix this site created by FP".  Much of the blame belongs not 
with the software, but with the original designer (I'm not saying FP is 
blameless mind you :)

The tools provide the mechanism, but without underpinning knowledge the 
tool is only as good as it's user!


Chris Higgs <c.higgs(at)landfood.unimelb.edu.au>
Institute of Land and Food Resources
University of Melbourne http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au

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