At 12:32 AM 1/15/2003 -0800, Daniel Russell wrote:
Number one rule in software:This is another way in which users are not all the same, and you need to determine which group of users is your target. Some software with the most power to the user and no apparent philosophies are among the most hated, hard to learn and hard to use, though sometimes the most powerful. A philosophy can give a program some coherence and make it more intuitive, especially if the user knows that the program was written with that particular philosophy.
Power to the user is more valuable than any philosophy that he programmers may artificially impose on the project....
As to power over texts, this is something that can get users in trouble and embarrassed. If a module is suppose to contain the text of a work of a certain author. but options and filters in the software produce a derivative text of it, users may quote that derivative text as the words of that author. This can attribute words to an author he never said. It can also make it seem that the author believed something he was opposed to. It makes the user and the software look bad. There is already a problem with other software of people quoting and wrongly crediting the quote to an author instead of the software and its creators. We should be careful not to become part of that problem.
Jerry
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