A Standard for Site Organization November 5, 1998 Some initial thoughts and pointers on the article: A Standard for Site Organization. The article addresses site organization, but it's something I've been hearing lately with talk about standards or other conventions. Jeff Veen was at Kvetch.Com for a chat session in June, 1998 and said "Like all magazines WORK the same way, but don't at all look or read the same way. " He also addressed meta data during the chat and which would play an important role in site organization. Or over at InfoWorld, Jakob Nielsen was interviewed and commented on this confusion. Jakob Nielsen "Today people don't even follow simple standards. So we have a huge amount confusion with user interfaces with no standards or conventions." Greg mentions the "web" as a better prefix than "www" for a domain name. Steve Capps (Microsoft) addressed this in an interview with News.Com: Steve Capps: "Walter Smith (a former Newton team member who followed Capps to Microsoft) pointed out that unfortunately people might expect to see "www" now. It becomes kind of an iconic tag that says, "Here is a Web site." So, even if we wanted to get rid of it, we may not be able to. So as you're driving down 101, you see on a billboard, www.bofa.com. You kind of say, "Oh, that's a Web site." So the www actually may outlive its usefulness in terms of the technical reason for navigating to a certain site, but people may keep it around just because it's a way of saying, "Hey, I'm a Web address." You know, it's shorthand to say "visit us at the Web."" And addressing how to sneak a change in: Steve Capps: "The UI (user interface) is ready to crash and burn. So like I said, let's try to sneak a new paradigm in before people get calcified in what they expect from browsing." How about domains mapped out like: http://support.microsoft.com or http://search.microsoft.com etc. which seem to be popular. No WWW or web. There's something here... not sure if a WSP movement or continued education and evangelism will help to turn the tide with these plexing UI issue on the Web.