[Mailman-Developers] The Philosophy of Web Use.

[emf]

Bryan Carbonnell wrote:

> For me it's nothing specific. It's more philosophical. I am a very
> minimalist when it comes to the 'net. Plain text e-mail and no
> scripting or embeded audio/video on web pages.

I can appreciate that philosophy, to some extent. So you always surf 
with JavaScript turned off? How do you turn off embedded media? Why is 
image embedding (I assume you don't turn off *all* images) acceptable 
within your philosophy while other media types are not?

> I think the content of
> the page should stand on its own legs and not rely on "fancy tricks"
> to make it appealing.

I agree that content should stand on its own legs. However, many 
websites- including mailman's interface - are applications where the 
*interaction* between the user and the content is at least as important 
as the content itself.

I know of no application environment where the behaviour of an 
application's user interface can be specified entirely through 
declarative code.

It's hard for me to see why one would want this in the first place; any 
dynamicism carries with it the requirement for some logical manipulation 
of the user interface and thus a requirement for logic.

Things like XForms try to shove a good deal of this into a declarative 
syntax; I would happily code an interface in this fashion, but the vast 
and mysterious gods of the internet have not deemed it possible. If you 
even want to use a XSLT transformation in any dynamic way in browsers, 
you have to load it from JavaScript.

You are, I assume, OK with the server doing whatever sort of dynamic 
foofaraw it likes to generate a given web page; what makes server side 
manipulations inherently superior to client-side manipulations?

> I also know that quite a few of my users are going to be up in arms if
> scripting gets added to the pages.

Of any sort? No changing to a high-visibility stylesheet without 
refreshing the content (that hasn't changed?) No in-page form 
validation? No changing active and inactive form elements based on the 
user's prior selections? No showing users a rendered preview of text 
they enter? No autocomplete in any text element? No reordering a list 
without a zillion little checkboxes/number boxes and ambiguous behaviour 
if the same number is entered twice? No re-sorting of lists? No 
context-sensitive help beyond the title="" attribute? No user feedback 
of any sort until a Submit button is pressed?

So in this philosophy, if I want to offer two mutually exclusive sets of 
options, I should: a.) display them both, then render a page saying "you 
can't do that" when they pick a combination that doesn't work; b.) make 
them resubmit the page with the appropriate radio button checked to see 
the 'other' possibility; c.) provide an additional bit of text that says 
"if you do x, then you can't do y"?

What do you do when you have a data structure not well suited to tabular 
display or a list/tree? Just give the user fragments of the content?

That's the part that gets me; if Content is sacrosanct, shouldn't 
providing as complete a picture in a given page's content be a goal?

> I just want to have the option to
> NOT use in in MM. I realize that I can just delete the JS file or
> disallow it with Apache, but I feel that since this is a MM endeavour
> I should be able to control it within MM and not have to resort to
> things like you mention to disable the JS.

I'm still not with you on this one; any user can turn off JS, but no 
user can turn on what you've disabled.

~ethan fremen