• Shorter development time because lots of the work is done for us
• Multilingual out of the box
• User aware out of the box allowing COLLABORATION
• Backed up
• Accessibility
Since the output is technically a website it could be uploaded to the net and function as a fully accessible website perhaps a ‘microsite’.
• Possibilities for revenue streams
e.g. people get to use the system as much as they like for free from one machine but pay to export the data OR they par-per-month etc. the list goes on.
• Undo
• No distribution, this enables collaborative development and incremental testing
Since it is not possible to know exactly what people want from the applcaition at the beginning an iterative design/development cycle offers a good way to decide what to add, tweak and remove from the experience. This is only possible when there’s a lightweight way of updating the app.
• Hackable (the output HTML & files)
• future possibilities for APIs
There’s no reason we couldn’t integrate Microformats into the content. Plopne sites provide RSS feeds of all folders and all search results pages (SRPs) aswell as feeds for a given content type etc.
• content can be repurposed for different platforms
for better or worse this option is open to us
• familiar interface
Users will be familiar with the Word-like WYSIWYG interface not to mention the standard web navigation widgets (e.g. links and buttons)
• It Won’t Work Unless You Have Broadband
Although we are aiming the prodfuct at broadband users the product will, in fact, work at narrow band speeds like 56k. Any application which is developed incrementally benefits from having a light weight way of tweaking and testing then interface for a desktop application to be updated in this way a) requirtes an updater to be designed and built and b) requires an internet connection.
• Institutional Restrictions – System Permissions & Firewall Settings
It’s not uncommon in museum, education, government and other large not-for-profit organisations to find that over protective network administrators do not allow software to be installed on workstations and set firewalls to the transfer of files via FTP(File transfer protocol).
These are concerns because:
a) Our website editing software works best$ in the Firefox web browser which is less popular than Internet Explorer (IE) (often because IE come pre-installed on Windows)
b) The application relies on people having the ability to transfer files from their machine to an online server.
To combat these concerns:
a) Simple tweaking will ensure that the application works in IE. A desktop application would of course also have to be installed.
b) Luckily the application relies in no way on being able to transfer files over FTP instead it uses HTTP for everything (like other sites)
$ It should be pointed out that although we suggest that users use Firefox, our websites are built to web-standards and are highly accessible through a wide range of browsers.
What they can both do
-be open surce
-conct to extenal databases
