Karl Stolley’s The Lo-Fi Manifesto is an excellent statement of principles for keeping the web accessible, especially in education:
“Lo-fi” describes a preferred set of production technologies that digital producers should strive to command, but as an acronym, LOFI outlines four principles of digital production that are essential for the advancement, extension, and long-term preservation of digital discourse:
- Lossless: Discourse presented through lo-fi production technologies neither degrades nor becomes trapped in the production itself. Text migrates and transforms from a single source (e.g., XML, or an application of XML) to any number of other devices and artifacts; images, video, and other media elements maintain their integrity as individual files that are orchestrated with one another at a reader’s moment of access, not at the producer’s moment of File > Import or File > Save.
- Open: Lo-fi artifacts’ source code and media elements are available for inspection, revision, and extension outside the scope of any one piece of production software and any one producer. Openness includes and encourages end-user/reader customization and repurposing.
- Flexible: Discourse artfully and rhetorically created with lo-fi production technologies can be experienced unobtrusively in multiple ways by different users equipped with a wide variety of conventional, mobile, and adaptive devices—all from a single artifact. No plugins, special downloads, or device-/reader-specific artifacts are required.
- In(ter)dependent: Lo-fi production technologies direct orchestration (like a recipe), not composition (like a TV dinner), allowing users and their devices full control to render (or not) and perhaps repurpose the media elements that constitute a digital artifact.