News
Search
Software
West staff
online
Reference
|
Some simplicity please
NOTHING is simple. I planned to write today about how the Internet has grown
from a nerdy haven into a sophisticated business-friendly medium. I was going to go back
four years when the coolest things you could see on Web pages were Nasa satellite images
or live shots of a fish tank in a university lab.
I was going to contrast that to today when you can tap your credit card details into a
page to buy anything from a pizza to a computer. And look at the ability to track down
seemingly unfriendly items such as houses and cars to take the pain out of big-scale
consumerism.
I was even going to suggest that Communications Minister Richard Alston's talk of a wired
Australia with an eye on e-commerce was a worthy and workable vision.
Then I remembered that Senator Alston's vision also includes Net censorship designed to
stop adults accessing what would be legal material in the offline world; that would be
ineffective because his un-named technology to block and filter this content would be
bypassed easily; that its implementation could slow down the Net and make it more
expensive, and that no one in the Net industry nor thousands who are connected actually
believe it is necessary.
And I also read about what the much-maligned nerds of the Net world were up to now. Nerd
is a bad stereotype of course. It conjures up a vision of someone so absorbed in
technology they have no idea what the real world wants. But does the real world want the
Net to be some vast shopping channel? Is it happy to have its Web surfing experience
dominated by Microsoft or AOL and their portals which direct them down one-dimensional
paths?
To counter this, the people who pioneered the medium with free, open-source software are
now releasing tools that will allow even more interaction on the Net. The BBC reported
last week on three important breakthroughs -- the GNU
interface to the Linux operating system, the Amaya
Web browser and a program called Third Voice.
GNU went on sale in Britain for half the price of Windows98. It puts a user-friendly
interface on Linux, allowing users to operate the complexities of a superior Unix-based
system as simply as if they were driving Windows or a Mac.
The Amaya browser from the World Wide Web consortium allows users to add features to other
users' Web sites. The W3C, the body that tries to set standards for the Web, says that
Amaya has a feature called update checking, which notifies users when pages they want to
publish have been updated by another user. "This can be seen as the first step toward
a cooperative authoring tool," says the W3C.
Third Voice is a commercial venture from California but based on cooperative development
of the Web, and may be an answer to correcting the so-called facts put out by hate sites
and the like. Users can download a plug-in for their browser which allows them to add
notes to pages.
On one hand, the Net is becoming the greatest shopping arcade on Earth. On the other, it
is further enhancing the ability of people to communicate and co-operate.
Which side will win? Is it even a war? Will both faces of the Net continue to grow?
Nothing is simple.
All articles Copyright: © West Australian Newspapers |
