www.gestaltweb.me.uk

Research Interests

I began my PhD at the University of Hull about Web Engineering and Quality back in January 2001. It has to be said now that the rate of progress is probably best measured in geological time. I think it's safe to say that work work will never be finished in this form

Why was I doing a PhD? Well, I have been a commercial web developer in my time and have always found it mystifying how haphazard the process of development sometimes is. There is plenty of work around concerning user interface and front end performance,courtesy of people like Jakob Neilsen (see this site) but it seemed that very little attention is being paid to the process from the web designer and developer's point of view. In the mid part of the decade this started to change a little, but I still think that there is a place for research in my area.

How can you build a site that is like good software; component based, modular and scalable. And how do you do all that and make it work on as wide a cross section of platforms as possible?

...and that's where I came in (or tried to). I explored the differences and similarities between software and document systems. I decided that, while different, they were similar enough to use the some of the same metrics to measure them? The question was, which ones?

I have a general interest in Web Engineering and development generally and also in the applicability of XML applications, content management and delivery mechanisms for heterogeneous environments.

So, I started writing things. Samples of documents are here. These are now mainly historical, As such many of them are rather rough and ready, so please excuse Type I Postscript rendering where it occurs. I did some of the later work on major documents using pdflatex so when or if I put further things here they should look a little slicker.

"No piece (of art) is ever finished, merely abandoned."