Announcing the FLUID Project

[Joseph Scheuhammer]

Hi Mark,

A fable.

Long ago, in the land of the ATRC, there were two projects that used XML 
to represent user preferences, namely the Broadband project, and 
Web-4-All.  The former defined a DTD for content preferences; the 
latter, a DTD for adaptive technology preferences.  Both projects were 
piloted, to a degree of success -- they were working systems that met 
project requirements.  Oh, they were not perfect; indeed they had flaws 
and needed improvement, but they worked.

The two DTD's were brought together into one, and submitted to the IMS.  
This submission formed the basis of many a discussion on how to 
represent display, control, and content preferences.  Many were the 
meetings to refine and improve the ideas embodied in the original work.  
The result was the accessForAll preferences schema for the Learner 
Information Package.

The AccLIP was fed back into Web-4-All, and Web-4-All was improved 
thereby.  Likewise, was the AccLIP adopted by TILE to transform content 
in response to user preferences, and that begat the AccMD (accessibility 
content metadata).  TILE begat TransformAble, which, in a way, begat Fluid.

Moral:  it is *very* useful to have a working system upon which to base 
some more general work.

To use a more normal tone:  hey, I'm kind of new to the agile/extreme 
methodology.  But, I see the merit in not spending a long period of time 
time nailing down a fully complete design before having any evidence 
that it will work.  You need to try out some ideas and get something 
working.  Then, step back and try to find the general principles from 
the working system, throw out the dead ends, and improve the system by 
refactoring according to the discovered generalities, and/or according 
to features that need to be added.  All the while keeping your eye on 
the main goals.

-- 
;;;;joseph

"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
        - "Bob", W. A. Yankovic -