Grrrrr! Philosophical debates drive me wild when they are part of a paper review! Now my view / assertion is that we don’t need mobile only sites - just mobile friendly ones - and creating them will build us a mobile ghetto much like the old accessibility only sites from the bad old days of Web Accessibility. **** You don’t need to believe me - I argue from the point of Websites, browsers, and users.

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.

Skipping to the end - the answer is I don’t know - but I think it’s worth considering! I’ve recently been considering if point and click ‘desktop’ / ‘window’ interfaces stifle innovation because they seem to be all encompassing and universal on all modern operating systems. Even though we have some desktop variations the metaphor still seems to be pervasive for most everyday tasks. It may be that this is not a problem, just as we use a desk for most writing tasks and a pen and paper and a filing system - these are part of everyday life and are no longer questioned - these tools are familiar and comfortable and so are now just ‘invisible’ to us.

(X)HTML Accesskeys have existed for years, and through most of this time I’ve been pushing for WebApp / RIA centred accesskeys, or in reality accesskeys linked - not by a character - but by the semantics of the functionality that the key relates to. Just recently, Charles McCathieNevile (chaals) who works for Opera Software Standards Group has revisited the problem by creating an accesskeys extension for Opera 11 beta – documentation is available.

I was recently contacted by ‘ScraperWiki’ who have an event in Manchester called ‘Hacks and Hackers Hack Day’, they say: We hope to attract ‘hacks’ and ‘hackers’ from all different types of backgrounds: people from big media organisations, as well as individual online publishers and freelancers… The aim is to show journalists how to use programming and design techniques to create online news stories and features; and vice versa, to show programmers how to find, develop, and polish stories and features.