W2 – From Photosetting to XML
‘The global media brands have perfected the presentation of news as a finished and seamless product’
This reading opens with a really good first sentence, but comes across as being obviously dated after that. It speaks of hypertext, and the structure of a story or narrative based on the links within. Clearly a news organisation is not going to link to external sources for a variety of reasons
1 – A commercial organisation won’t want to lose pageviews on their own site
2- A non-commercial organisation won’t want to link to a page that they don’t control, a page which could change or be taken offline at any time.
Both of these hold true for either commerical or non-commercial too.
However good points are made about a story losing its intended meaning by being associated with whatever the user chooses to click on next. Though most news sites now have relevant links and content associated with each story either beneath or next to it. Importantly, these links are never within the story.
Otherwise the reading talks a bit about the technology and standards associated with that technology. Again the age of the article is apparent here as much of what is mentioned is no longer an issue today – broadband, high resolution/color displays and only 2 dominant browsers have put an end to the majority of issues mentioned. Also, news sites are now designed much better than they once were, as with most of the sites on the web.
