Neema Moraveji: "The students, 16-18 years old, ran the gamut of anti-computer artists to tech geeks but, by the end, everybody was interested in designing the interface to their group's application.... What was once a classroom full of loud and disobedient teenagers has turned into a thriving learning environment where all ideas are listened to and people have to validate their opinions ... students had never looked at software this way. They never thought about why they like AOL."
Adam Kalsey has kicked off Simplified, a new series on web usability, with some thoughts on creating usable web forms. The conversation continues on Paul Scrivens' blog, and covers a lot of interesting ground. D. Keith Robinson also has some tips on better form design in his latest Gorilla Web Tip.
10:56:31 PM
Software Complexity Sean McGrath: "Some software complexity cannot be destroyed, it can only be moved from one place to another. "
10:51:45 PM
"Every area of study he encounters preaches interdisciplinary unity at first, then turns around and argues why their particular discipline is the best and should ultimately be in charge." [Rob Adams paraphrasing Matt Easterday]
10:35:36 PM
Chris Nitchie: "The basic problem is that PDF is a crappy format, especially for content on the web. This is one of the big reasons why everybody should just author their content in XML. That way, you write it once, and pass it through a XSL stylesheet for the web (for big documents, you can chop it up into easily downloadable hunks programmatically), and an XSL-FO stylesheet for print. No duplication of effort for the different formats. No copying and pasting. No bothering the IT guys to turn your word document into a webpage. Once the infrastructure is in place, you write it once, push a button, and you've got every format you need.
This is exactly what Arbortext enables. Today. A lot. And our customers love it."
Sounds like a great vision. Where's the universal WYSIWYG XML editor for the masses? Jon Udell thinks it might be Word 2003 or InfoPath but I'm not holding my breath. I love Radio, but I'm looking at other options for blogging tools. Is there an Arbortext based solution out there for me? Why isn't Arbortext knocking on Movable Type's doors and getting their widget deployed on Typepad? Udell waxes rhapsodically on semantic blogging. Seems like the Epic editor could make this happened. What do you think?
