[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Michael Snow]

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.

--Michael Snow