Goals of Better Practices
From Better Practices
As with any real world problem, presenting expository mathematics on the Web involves several different, often conflicting goals. Articulating these goals and their relative importance can help shape our discussions and choices of better practices.
- Better practices should be easy and inexpensive. This is, perhaps, the single most important goal because easily implemented better practices will draw more authors into our joint enterprise and because it will allow those authors, especially authors whose primary interests are content and learning, to focus on those issues rather than the technical details of "authoring."
- Materials written using better practices should look good. This helps reinforce the pride of workmanship without which our products will be shoddy.
- Materials written using better practices should be robust, both across platforms and time.
- Better practices must always be scientifically and pedagogically sound.
- Shareabilty is a better practice. In some sense this is a foundational goal because it furthers the goals identified above. It is easier to build materials in larger chunks using proven components -- components that look good, that are robust, and that are scientifically and pedagogically sound.
- Both the tools and content should be open source. The underlying goals here are accessibility to users, ease of authoring, and extensibility or customizability.
- Better practices should not be restrictive. We live in a fast moving environment. We don't know which of the tools available will be the most useful and the most successful. This goal and the preceding goal are sources of great conflict. Much of the best software is proprietary. The underlying threats to robustness are due in large part to the Babelization of programming languages, browsers, operating systems, and authoring software. Nonetheless restriction hinders progress and creativity.
- Better practices in mathematics on the web should include, wherever possible, best practices in accessibility. Web pages, tools, and components should be Section 508 compliant, (at least) in high priority checkpoints.
