You may have heard me banging on about declarative Web languages… I contest that in the near future it will not be possible for an untrained author, to simply read a small specification of the language, open a text editor and create a page; simply uploading the result to the Web…I am not suggesting a “Luddite” like, return to the old days of Web authoring, but instead, am calling for a simplified all-in-one Web language (either declarative or meta) which can be learnt in a short amount of time, by untrained programmers, who can use a text editor as the creation tool.

I was recently ask to perform a barrier walkthrough on the wordpress.com front page. As a side note I must say that Firefox with Firebug proved really useful when it came to answering some of the more code/css based questions in the walkthrough. In the end the page did quite well but it’s a kind of internal mash-up with what looks like different coders developing different parts of the page.

Mark Lombardi was a transformational hypertext artist - well at least - he is to me. But maybe even he didn’t know this because he never used the machinery of hypertext but looking at this art, to me, we can see that it really is hypertext. But the great transformational aspects of the work is the movement of his global networks of conspiratorial relationships from what could have turned into a dry preaching report to an art form immediately accessible and viable to all.

Ask any well informed Web developer to rate how important Web accessibility is, and I’d expect most to rank it high. Ask them why, and I’d expect most to talk about disabled users, altruism, and the law. An enlightened few may talk about the business case, or expand on the many technical advantages of making their sites accessible. As a professional developer you’ll know that many disabled users consider the Web to be a primary source for information, employment and entertainment.