Some, ok most of the
Some, ok most of the folks on the CHI-WEB list are a lot smarter than me. Take this quote for example:
Which is to say that you favour a rigid application of the strategy of
fitting every site’s content into a hierarchically organised space. For
contextually sensible deviations from this model to be labeled
‘serendipitous' speaks volumes about the dominance of this approach.
(though perhaps I overstep the mark in characterising what you are saying)
This strictly hierarchical model does have its strenghts as you point
out. It’s important though to understand that it is not the only
approach, and that it comes with inherent problems. It is utterly
dependent on second guessing which way the user wants and expects to go
next. It is not particularly scalable in the face of massive
heterogeneous information collections targetted at a wide variety of
users with different interests in the items in the collection. While it
commonly does not concern the designers of small sites, this is the norm
on the internet as a whole, and within the scope of almost any substanital
repository of information.
What the hell did he say?