[Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

[Dave Collins]

> But then I'm an information architect and the technology could be
anything
> - the end result is what matters.

Thank you, thank you, thank you ... 

This list is for IA, big and small, and we are a user centered design
community, this means that THE USER needs to come first.


Don't forget though that the definiton of 'user' is tricky. 

Here, more than with any technology in the past, users are also
developers. I don't simply mean people can switch between two hats (I'm
a user, no I'm a developer), I mean that users-AS-developers are users.

Aunt Mary, who only wants to put up pictures of her grandkid's first
birthday can do so with an (arguably) reasonable amount of expertise. It
is in part, this ubiquity of user/developer that has made the Web so
popular. I doubt it would have achieved this if everyone who churned out
a site had to have a programming degree. 

Simplicity of the technology (as we were attributing to HTML) is a key
factor in the popularity of the Web. Thus the technology behind the Web
has a direct impact on its users.

Dave