What comes first? The Design or the Technology

Tom Worthington FACS

Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd, Canberra

For Internet World Australia 2001, Sydney, Thursday, 19 July, 11:20am.

Slides available

Based on the university lecture series: Website Design, For Information Technology Professionals

Summary:

After being involved in pioneering many early web sites, IT professionals have tended to be relegated to a technical support role in web site development. This is starting to cause problems as the scale of web sites and their increasing functionality exceed the skills of graphic designers, librarians, journalists and marketers. The World Wide Web (Web) is a computer system and IT professionals are uniquely placed to provide a deep understanding of how to build such systems well. One example is that IT professionals can show how to bypass the dead-end of current WAP applications and create web sites which work with conventional web browsers, as well as wireless devices using WAP 2 and I-mode.

Outline

Postscript: (18 July 2001)

  1. Children's groupware, the mobile killer application? Hyperthetical dinner conversation:
    In the chaos of what is a family dinner there is a loud beeping from under one of the children. Little Joan pulls out the brightly coloured wireless kiddy-net PDA she has been sitting on and switches on the screen. "Mum, Jane says that the soccer training had to be moved and Thursday was the best day the group calendar could schedule. But can you sign my screen to tell the teacher it is okay to miss art class?". ;-)
  2. MovieLink Internet

    MovieLink Keyboard Screen Shot of www.tomw.net.au Screen Shot of peopledaily.co.jp/english/i/

  3. DVB-HTML... One application area considered of commercial importance for the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP)is that of the provision of a hypertext or "super teletext" system for the presentation of information alongside broadcast.In order to promote interoperability, both between different MHP vendors and where possible with the wider internet, this document describes a specific subset of the data formats needed for use in the World Wide Web adopted by the MHP, plus DVB specific extensions., Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) Specification 1.1 DRAFT, European Telecommunications Standards Institute 2000. Note this document is a 1448 page ZIPPED, PDF file. See: http://www.mhp.org/technical_essen/html_index.html
  4. Cocoon is a 100% pure Java publishing framework that relies on new W3C technologies (such as DOM, XML, and XSL) to provide web content. The Cocoon project aims to change the way web information is created, rendered and served. The new Cocoon paradigm is based on the fact that document content, style and logic are often created by different individuals or working groups. Cocoon aims for a complete separation of the three layers, allowing the three layers to be independently designed, created and managed, reducing management overhead, increasing work reuse and reducing time to market. The Apache Software Foundation, 1999-2001
  5. OpenOffice.org is an Open Source community project building the next generation of office-productivity software. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc., and hosted by CollabNet, Inc., OpenOffice.org provides the full infrastructure for global, Open Source community work and growth. OpenOffice.org, 2001

About the speaker:

Tom Worthington is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University. He is an independent electronic business consultant and author of the book Net Traveller. Tom is one of the architects of the Commonwealth Government's Internet and web strategy. The first Web Master for the Australian Department of Defence, in 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society for his contribution to the development of public Internet policy. Tom is a director and past President of the Australian Computer Society and a voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Further Information:


This document is Version 2.0 – 12 June 2001: http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/wf.html

Comments and corrections to: webmaster@tomw.net.au

Copyright © Tom Worthington 2001.