Weinberger reports on a conference session about the invention of alphabetical order, developed a new type of reader: not a scholar who reads continuously but someone who looks things up." The prevalence of search engines is rederning other kinds of indexes less important.
Posted by alevin at May 31, 2003 01:43 PM | TrackBackARGH! No way... We're always going to need a standard, agreed-upon way to sort lists. It's a matter of scope. Finding a group of things via a search or hyperlink is great to limit the range of possibilities, but once you have a decent-sized (i.e n > 7) group of items with the same or very similar context, have no additional filters to reduce your scope, and want to facillitate scanning (which is also a valid lookup mechanism), you need a deterministic standard for listing or else you have chaos.
Posted by: davidnunez on June 6, 2003 02:57 PM