[Mailman-Developers] The Philosophy of Web Use.

[emf]

Brad Knowles wrote:

> One thing that really concerns me is excessive complexity in the user
> interface.  As a MacOS X/Safari user, I've found so damn bloody many web
> sites that are totally hosed for me, regardless of whether I allow them to
> use JavaScript or not. 

I can see that; I have that problem intermittently.

> But the more complexity that is built into the user interface,
> the higher the likelihood is that something will accidentally happen
> somewhere to seriously break something for someone else.

This is really vague; I have no idea how, given that I have said that 
this thing will work without JavaScript on at all, this "don't do it 
because it might be complicated" heuristic is applicable.

> In fact, I think it's quite likely that you will even be put into a
> situation where a bug in a given platform/browser combination causes you
> to completely re-work a lot of your carefully written code,

I'll put $10 down on the side of "I know what browsers do" and thus 
won't have to re-work my code to accommodate one broken browser.

> In other words, I'd like to see that you really can walk in all the
> different likely shoe and surface combinations, before we let you draft us
> into supporting your plans to win the marathon -- especially if we're all
> going to be giving you all our scissors, razors, knives, swords, and other
> bladed instruments.

This strikes me as an argument from extremes; I am not advocating doing 
anything particularly complex.

> I'd rather not, no.  I have yet to see a single place on the Internet that
> actually does it right, and across all platform/browser combinations.

If you would give a concrete example maybe we could get past FUD.

> More often than not, when typing in a phone number, I'll be unable to
> enter the last four digits because they simply set a length limitation on
> the field, and didn't bother to check for non-numeric characters.

Length limitation is something you can set in HTML. It's possible to 
make that mistake in JavaScript, too, but it's not JavaScript's fault.

> I'd rather not, no.  Again, every single website I've ever seen that tries
> to show me exactly what my comment is going to look like ends up not
> working very well. 

Have you used http://wiki.list.org/ ? Is it "flat out broken" or "slow 
and distracting"? I find it has a few bugs, but mostly it works well.

>> reordering a list without a zillion little checkboxes/number boxes and ambiguous behaviour
>> if the same number is entered twice?
> 
> Not really, no.  When I've seen that done in the past, it was almost
> always dead-dog slow and far more of an annoyance than any help that it
> could possibly have been.

Here's a specific example that works well for me: Does the drag/drop of 
boxes on the customized google home page not work for you? You don't 
have to sign in to try it, and it allows drag/drop reordering for me in 
Safari just fine, and way more intuitively than resubmitting the page 
after clicking on buttons.

> Like that damn bloody stupid "find as you type" crap.  I've learned a few
> things about torture over the years. 

I'm sorry that this has been so unpleasant for you. I find it helpful in 
several cases.

>> 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?
> 
> I'm not sure that I've got any answers for you, with regards to how you
> should resolve this issue. 

So you have no constructive feedback, nor a sufficiently detailed 
critique that I can even address your concerns. I'm not sure what you 
would have me do with your advice, beyond my already existing commitment 
to make the page work without JavaScript.

> it's not physically possible to know, a priori, everything that any
> user might ever want to do under any and all possible circumstances.

If this were the criteria, no user interface would ever get built.

I have already articulated a strategy that covers all browsers currently 
released with a measurable market share.

* IE 5+, Mozilla (any), Safari from 1.0+ and any other KHTML browsers, 
JAWS 6+, Opera 6+, Lynx, Links. All in any combination of 
Images/CSS/JavaScript off/on.

I look forward to your feedback when I have something that you can try; 
perhaps that will help us talk about specific issues.

~ethan fremen