On 6/9/2010 12:12 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
There have been a lot of red herrings brought up
on all sides of that
issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is
clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at
supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be
putting in control of their own quest for information.
I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission
is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in
terms of what is available. We make things available, and they
should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what
we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission.
My point has nothing to do with making things unavailable. There are
other ways of supporting reader choice. As for the pretense that it's
possible to sidestep value decisions about making or enabling choices,
just by adopting "availability" as a default, that's simply wrong. The
present situation involving interlanguage links is a perfect
illustration of that. Regardless of which interface approach we adopted,
the links were going to remain available, there was no thought that they
would be deleted or that feature eliminated. The question is how they
are going to be available, at what point we are going to present the
reader with the choice, and what mechanisms will be used to enable those
choices. Those are crucial questions to confront in our work, and they
apply to much more than just interlanguage links, important as those are.
You are precisely accurate in terms of the reason why people
are so offended by the collapsing of interlanguage links, is
just because that is against our mission.
And that is just a minor way of going against our mission. I would
suggest nobody even encompass going more directly against that
mission.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen