Re: designers as users etc.

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> Sadly (to me), the software frameworks people are designing around
> markup aren't nearly as flexible.  Developers seem to be writing code
> that couples tightly to data based on very limited possibilities for
> what that code might contain, though many larger frameworks offer
> "escape hatches" where they suspect such things are necessary.

I think that the early stages of the web have necessarily been about
the less-techie crowd learning about what can be done, which has
meant limiting options for much the same reasons that any intro level
course doesn't dwell on advanced features.

The ITS ("Incompatible Timesharing System") was explicitly not an
intro level effort, so different rules had to apply there.  I suspect that
in context, it was still simpler than the innards of many web sites that
readers here use on a daily basis.  The design process for ITS was
in many ways like a single-campus version of many open source
(or Free software) development projects of today.

When folk take off their "dot com blinders" and stop viewing the
web primarily in terms of commerce, I think those "escape hatches"
may become the primary targets of system architecture ... rather than
unavoidable artifacts of large scale cash-extraction systems.  (Which
is not to say that flexible systems can't extract cash ... :)

- Dave