Here or there, or ... where?

With one person with whom I've worked I built a small web site telling part of his long and eventful history. The site was very pleasing, both to him and his children and grandchildren, but was also quite instructive for me, particularly when I realized something interesting in his relationship to the site. This particular person was able to open a Word document, type into it, and then save his new work. But he didn't seem to realize (or remember) the fact that he couldn't do this on his site. (I'm not at all sure that he was able to distinguish between a web page and a Word document, though he never thought of trying to edit an online newspaper web page.) In other words, if he could edit a Word document that came up on his screen, why couldn't he do the same with a web page? I have to admit that, particularly in the age of blogging, that's a rather logical question - a question that has led to numerous positive developments in the realm of the read/write web. In this particular case, however, it wasn't being asked from a position of understanding, from a standpoint of "shouldn't we be able to do this?", but instead simply out of confusion. The web page and the Word document seemed to be coming from the same place, so shouldn't we be able to relate to them in the same way?



Go to: Taking a peek into a personal hard drive, or
Go to: The (digital) cleaning lady