At a recent CyberSuds meeting (a group of Web designers who get together
to swap war stories) the concensus seemed to be that everyone had gone
overboard using Netscape enhancements. One of the major concerns is that
flashy pages that use lots of cgi scripts put a strain on the server and
so cause a loss of productivity/accessibility.

Netscape tossed these goodies into the ring to let us fight over them
with the idea that what is truly worthwhile would win out and new
demands would arise. It's the same logic Marc Andressen used for inline
graphics in Mosaic. They are not proprietary, AT&T Interchange and
Microsoft Network are prorietary (but I'm playing with them, too).
Netscape may have captured the market (one that makes no profit,
remember) this year but things are changing rapidly. There are browsers
in the pipeline that make Netscape look like two tin cans and a wire.

Jim Angus' pages are great but, frankly, I don't have the patience to
download all the graphics via 14.4 no matter how convenient. Yet, who
knows, by this time next year I may have an ISDN line running directly
to my home and that point will be moot. I didn't even know what a SLIP
was a year ago.

The Web is not a CD-ROM or a printed book but has strengths the other
mediums don't. At this point we need to find out what those strengths
will be and for that we need to experiment and demo. We need to invent
design for the Web as well as develop database standards. We need to be
proactive rather than reactive in terms of software development. As
Esther Dysen said in a recent issue of WIRED:

"It is easy to program software to solve problems but hard to define
those problems and questions precisely." (WIRED JULY 1995 p. 137)

Museums have to get involved in order to define those problems, even if
that means I have to wait to download Jim's images.


_________________________________________
ROBBIN MURPHY, ArtNetBBS/ArtNetWEB
426 Broome Street, NYC 10013
Phone: 212 [log in to unmask]
http://www.awa.com/artnetweb/