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July 14, 2003
Self-edited Web Sites
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, talks at length in Weaving the Web about how the Web is a failed project because it is primarily read-only. His vision was to create an application for collaborative reading and writing, where users could use the same application (browser) to read and author Web documents.
Tim may have had a valid point in 2000, when the book was published. Some new applications, especially Wiki, have gotten closer to his vision. Blogs to a degree have realized Tim's vision, but while they enable mass publishing, they don't do much for collaborative writing. It's still cumbersome to easily contribute your writings to a site, in general.
I hope that Wiki and blogging are a move in the direction of self-edited Web sites. Most organizations I have worked for have made it almost impossible for individual employees to edit their own Web pages, or directly participate in the development of company Web sites. There's always a layer of Web developers to go through, to keep employees from breaking company Web sites. Even when the Web site is one that the non-Web-developer employees are responsible for developing the content, it still has to go through the Web development group.
I'd like to see a model more like word processing. It used to be that word processing also had to go through the company word processing department, to keep people from hurting themselves (on sophisticated machinery like typewriters). I doubt that many people today have to put in requests for changes to their Word documents. I compose and send out dozens of Word (and Visio and PowerPoint) documents in any given month, all on my own. Nobody's gotten hurt that I can tell.
I'd like to be able to do the same with Web documents. I'd like to be able to regularly put documents and Web pages on the UEN Engineering Web site or the other UEN sites, as easily as I can update a Word document.
Posted by pete at July 14, 2003 3:13 PM