Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

There seems to me that there is a solution to this on the web and perhaps elsewhere (scientific publishing comes to mind for me).

We need to segregate data from presentation. More importantly we need to give users a choice in how their data is presented instead of forcing a particular design or presentation of the content on them.

If a user can choose how they want to read an article (tablet? desktop with lines of text that run the full width of the screen? phone? terminal window?) we should let them and give them options. There is no best way to present data because users are not all the same robotic machine, some prefer one format some prefer another. There is no universal best.

Why can't I read HN's content using reddit's design? Maybe I can and I haven't tried. My point is that most of the content we consume on the internet is text, pictures and video. I hate the youtube interface. Why the hell can't someone write a better one and then I view youtube's data that way?

Dissociate the front end from the backend. Send all the interface designers off to design frontends for any website that with a certain kind of data. Let the user pick which frontends they want for which website and then the website can send the data. Compensate the the frontend designer by giving them a portion of the revenue or something, or have users pay a little bit for frontends on an app store or something, or have websites pay the designer of the most effective frontend to use it as the default for users who don't bother to choose their own frontend(smarter people than me can figure out how to monetize this).

Am I insane to think that for a huge portion of the content on the web data and presentation can be completely segregated? Text is text, pictures are pictures, figures in papers are figures. Sure, a data person might insist that their data must be presented in a certain way, but isn't that just saying "fuck the user I'm and artist?"

What would it take for a system like this to become reality? (in scientific publishing what it would take is publishers releaseing the raw xml versions of the paper--which they already have--and it would make stuff like citations a thousand million times easier to deal with)

> What would it take for a system like this to become reality?

It already is a reality. If you want to divorce content completely from presentation, you can do that right now, today, with HTML & CSS. There's no technical hurdle stopping you.

The problem is that understanding that "content" and "presentation" are two separate things requires people to work at a level of abstraction that most of them are not used to working at. In the tools they're familiar with, it's all mashed together. (You can separate the two in Word with things like document styles, but that's not how Word works by default; and there's little practical benefit to doing so for small documents anyway, so few people discover it unless a more advanced user takes the time to teach them.) So when you try to teach them to do their work in this new way, it feels to them like you're just adding unnecessary complications to their workflow. They then reject your tools as pointless egghead stuff, and you for trying to foist them on them.

It's a cultural problem, in other words, not a technical problem.

We need to segregate data from presentation.

Sorry, but I don’t buy that. The very best presentation is almost always customised to the material it conveys.

We try to separate content and presentation as a compromise, partly because it’s too labour-intensive to craft a bespoke presentation for every little job, and partly to separate skill sets because someone can be a great author but suck at design. But it’s still a compromise, and someone who both knows their material and knows design will often be able to create a more effective presentation of that material than they could if they were constrained to some pre-determined, standardised box of presentation tools.

By the same principle, it’s not necessarily an advantage to let someone viewing that content customise the design arbitrarily, because it’s almost axiomatic that such a person isn’t yet an expert on the material. They don’t know which ideas are the important ones that the author wants to build on, or which relationships in the data are the most enlightening ones to explore. A well made presentation, created by or in collaboration with a subject matter expert, can direct the viewer through the material in a more considered way.

To me, it makes no more sense to use a medium where the viewer has to make presentation choices than it does to send them a few spreadsheets of raw data and let them write their own content or plot their own charts.

Let me rephrase my original statement. We need to segregate data from a single format/layout.

I do not think the analogy to spreadsheets applies here. There are (at least) thousands of perspectives on/presentations of scientific data that are completely meaningless. In that case the perspective and presentation matters (though the sharing the original data opens up the opportunity for others to find new perspectives as well, though at the moment they do need to 'plot their own charts')

That said, once the author has chosen the perspective that perspective will be conveyed via some medium. At that point the data should be able to stand on its own. I used the word presentation, but 'layout' is probably closer to what I meant. If we take my use of presentation literally then we agree and this is why someone posting slides for a talk without also posting the talk is a terrible idea.

With regard to expertise, I would argue that everyone is an expert on what format/layout they find easier to use (sort of like why we let people move their windows around in a window manager instead of forcing them all full screen, re: tablets are major offenders here). I'm not talking about letting people change the words here or put the legend for figure 1 with the data for figure 3.

Most sites have segregated data from presentation. The problem would be your second point - that it's not exposed as being user controllable. It is in fact user controllable through scripting in most cases, but it's not surfaced in any way.

Right in my browser, firefox, and maybe yours, I can set the default fonts, sizes, and colors, and I can force sites to use my settings. This is a partial step towards where you're going. Most designers will not simply use the foreground, background, serif, and sans-serif fonts that a user has set. This could be a good thing, since the majority of people don't even know that these options exists, but it is forcing a single design upon the users.

For desktop, there is Stylish. Write your own CSS.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

Maybe you want to try this Angular YouTube interface http://toogl.es/

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