Jerry Hastings wrote:
Sure. I did not go into these details in my statement, because i assume the readers know this. This is not what i was referring to. A coherent GUI is very important and generally i think Programmers fail to put enough energy into this. Certainly a philosophy is important in designing the user interface. I was referring to philosophies that regulate features available in programs, not the way in which these features are *presented*. And i was referring to artificial restrictions, not natural ones like a deadline for release.At 12:32 AM 1/15/2003 -0800, Daniel Russell wrote:Number one rule in software:
Power to the user is more valuable than any philosophy that he programmers may artificially impose on the project....
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.
I thought that was the point of filters (?). Are not filters something that the *user* turns on. Obviously the default presentation after installation *must* be the raw unaltered module's text.
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
If the user set's his Internet Explorer home page to www.jerryspringer.com, that does not make Microsoft look bad. Therefore, Microsoft put the homepage feature into IE. :P
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