An interesting example of the limitations of conventional web news design, and a proposed solution. Observing that some readers tend to skim articles just for the quotations (because they're interesting, they provide human angles, they condense opinion, they bypass editorialising, etc), Adrian Holovaty proposes that webpages have features to highlight quotations by (automatically it is hoped) tagging the quoted bits so that they can be shown in their own style. 'Course, in print media we already have a quotation emphasis system. It's called the pull quote. But yikes! It turns out that this quote tag already exists in HTML (Internet Explorer excepted, of course)! But Holovaty takes the idea further and suggests that these tagged items could be parsed and indexed so that a reader could see, for example, "all today's quotes" as an alterntive index, or "all quotes by X". Trouble with the latter is, much as the quote identification could be automated, catching the attributions might be trickier. But it's a sweet idea.
(From Holovaty.com)
Monday, December 01, 2003
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