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Conclusions

Methodology

The development methodology composed by John December worked very well. In "Matters of Development" December said that some people mistakenly consider web development to be equivalent to "HTML coding". The development methodology left this step until the final stage. In my case, there was not ICS web present until very late on in the development, and I found that implementing the basic ICS web took about 15 minutes! I believe this to be a property of a well thought out development process.

However, the methodology was aimed at commercial, "remote resource", rather than the "practical", interactive web I created. This, however, only caused minor problems which could be resolved by using common sense. For example, the revision of the methodology I was using talked little about items such as working with a small, contained community, or the fact that a web could be a users gateway into the World Wide Web.

The whole development process is most certainly an continuous process. In my case, the index and user survey were added later, but I found it difficult to actually show this fact in the development report.

Implementation

I found Microsoft Word with the Internet Assistant good for writing the report, and pages of text in general. It allows all the functions of Word, i.e. outline view, spell-checking etc., but exports in HTML. It was, however, slightly restricting when it came to page layout, and was not quite WYSIWYG.

Netscape Navigator 3 Gold was much more WYSIWYG, and was very good for 'tinkering about' with the page layout.

Both editors produce messy HTML (see the HTML code for the report!), and I manually tidied up everything that was being placed within the ICS web. Consequently the HTML for the ICS web is not always compatible with these editors, and is imported incorrectly into them.


The Research and Development of the Informatics Web

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