On Thu, Jun 11, 1998 at 07:28:59AM -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> Not really true any more, Rich. [...]
I guess your readership differs from mine; on one mailing list that
I handle, roughly 5% of the people have access to mail but not to the web.
Locking those people out isn't a viable option (their contributions
and their presence are valuable), so I've made sure that they can
participate even though they're (mostly) on non-IP networks.
My concern (well, one of my concerns) is that the web is so seductive
that everyone is falling all over themselves to provide a web interface --
to mailing lists, to news servers, to network management s/w, etc.
This is all very glitzy and nice but I find that it serves no real
purpose, and in fact may do harm by obscuring the underlying details,
an understanding of which is crucial to end users whether they realize
it or not.
For example, I find that many, many end users are confused by the
difference between mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups -- which have
similar, but differing standards for content, netiquette, etc. -- because
they use a web-based interface that doesn't clearly distinguish between them.
This is not to say that these two mediums won't converge and one
day be indistinguishable; perhaps they will. But they are at present
quite different and client software which obscures this does a disservice
to the end user and to the 'net community.
--Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
rsk@gsp.org
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