Hello, Steve,
Thank you for your suggestion. I may have to do that.
I have been using the wiki to present ideas on Struts generally and on buttons in particular for some time and had no difficulty until I criticised the DispatchAction solution and its progeny as well as the ImageButtonBean. I would like to be a part of this community if I can do so without having to agree or to appear to agree with ideas I do not care to advance or to advocate. I thought and still think that this must be possible.
I am not sure whether you are saying what I can say in criticism of these ideas is limited here or what. I know that I personally cannot control, nor do I wish to, whether or not someone decides to put something in the middle of my presentation. That is and has been a fact. I more than anyone am mindful of that fact.
I don't know if there are any "rules" on that. Don't you think there should be? Am I alone in thinking that putting ideas I am trying to discard or to suggest that we discard into the middle of my presentation is not the high water mark in courtesy?
Is this not something that is fair discussion on the Struts wiki? I admit that I have not been happy with having to deal with and to reorganize constantly due to this happening. I thought, however, that discussing it might be better than just leaving without seeing whether or not there were some implicit if not explict rules on this thing.
I hope you can see this at least a bit from my perspective. Or, do you think that my side of this deal has no validity whatsoever? Is the request to allow me to fill out this page and to add comments at the end or separately totally unreasonable?
Michael McGrady
Sorry, Jim, no last word for you yet. Please try later.
Steve Raeburn wrote:
Michael,
The short answer to people "messing with your format" is to publish your ideas/comments on your own web site. Then you could add a link from the Wiki if you wish.
I encourage you to do so, or accept the fact that a Wiki page is a communal resource.
Steve
-----Original Message----- From: Michael McGrady [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: September 24, 2004 10:51 AM To: Struts Developers List Subject: Re: Struts Wiki Etiquette: Niall's Help
Thanks for this response, Matt. I understand your thinking. However, the difficulty is that you don't know where I am going with this. No way you could, of course, but where I am going does not fit in with these ideas.
If people don't know about DispatchAction, etc., they are not the people I am trying to talk to at the moment. I am talking about jet cars and don't want to include the model-T in my presentation. If others want to remind us of the model-T, which has had its day in the Sun, they can do so at the end or elsewhere. What is the difficulty with that? The only difficulty is that I cannot keep people out of the middle of the page and because I have a more generic solution than you know about coming up I want to be able to slowly build that.
Let me suggest, Matt, that you start a new page called something like "The Known Solutions to Buttons" and you can reference this page? I don't want to do that page. I want to do something different. You probably don't want to do that page either. If you do, however, it is not what I am doing here. I like your idea. I would encourage it. That is not what I am doing. Can I do what I am doing? I have added a bit more to the start of the wiki to give you an idea. You might look at the <crackwillow:image> note.
Michael McGrady
Matt Bathje wrote:
I'm going to respond to this before I respond to your longer reply, as it is easier for me.
I understand that you are presenting new solutions to an old problem. But, you also say the the old solution is no good, without giving detail why. Having them all in one place allows users to compare/contrast.
Like I said, you can setup the structure I suggested without mentioning DispatchAction, and it will allow others to bring it up without messing with your format. This allows the new ideas and the old ideas to intermingle, and gives people a free chance to express their opinions of all of them.
A new page could be put together at the same level as "Struts Catalog Five Multiple Button Solutions" to explain other ways of solving the problem...it just makes more sense to me to have the problem and all possible/known solutions defined in one place.
I guess my question back to you would be - why limit the page to the 5 solutions you have chosen? Why *can't* the older solutions (even if you don't like them) be put onto the page. Well the current answer to that is how you have formatted the page.
A different format to the page = old and new solutions intermingled by collaboration.
Matt
Michael McGrady wrote:
Maybe I should add, Matt, that all the solutions I add on this page are new solutions. The other solutions that people are trying to put into this page have been in public for two years and more. If there is not a place to present these new ideas without having to cover the old ones, then don't you think that will systematically stiffle new ideas? I don't want to write a manual as if I were working at $soft.
Michael McGrady
Matt Bathje wrote:
Maybe I shouldn't step in the middle of this...but I'm (stupidly?) going to.
As both of you have agreed, (and is in fact the case) a Wiki is about the sharing of ideas and collaboration.
The problem as I see it is that you have the page set up in a manner that cannot be changed or added to easily. By formatting the page in the way you have, it inherently disallows alternate viewpoints. The page is also unwieldy and hard to follow, and was so before Niall made his changes.
Might I suggest a major overhaul to the layout of the page, making better use of the wiki format. The suggestions are:
Change the name of the link from "Five Multiple Button Solutions" to something like "Multiple Submit Buttons on One Form Solutions". Yes it is longer, but it implies a much better meaning than the current title. It also doesn't limit the page to be about the 5 solutions 1 person has chosen as acceptable.
Instead of having all possible solutions on one page with a weird table of contents, use the wiki format. Have "MultipleSubmitButtonsOnOneFormSolutions" be a short page of mostly links to new wiki pages. Each of these pages will contain 1 possible solution. On this new "table of contents" page, put a short description of the solution by its link.
Have some introduction to the problem on the "table of contents" page. The one presented currently is not helpful to a struts newbie.
Make one of the links mentioned above be all about DispatchAction and its kin. Or don't, perhaps somebody else will...but if you follow a format like I am suggesting, all alternatives can be easily presented without affecting the "look" of the individual solutions. In the comments section of the main page, people can express their views on which is their favorite/most hated solution :)
Possibly add a pros/cons section to each solution so you can tell people what is wrong with DispatchAction, and why they might try other solutions.
Assuming I explained this well enough, I think it would solve most of the problems we are seeing.
Matt
Michael McGrady wrote:
The only reference to you, Niall, so far as I remember, was to credit your work as yours. I did not want my name associated with those thoughts. I have credited others on the page. I did not laud you, because you are trying to include ideas I am explicitly trying to critique and to surpass.
I don't see any personal attacks on you, nor do I feel antagonistic in any way towards you. I am not going to get into the personal attacks thing more than I have.
I would like to be able to present some ideas coherently. Your grasp of this particular area on Struts seems to me to be suspect and you seem to have no sense of the look and feel of this wiki page. I am very interested in a debate of any kind on these things. But, you and I will have to separate our ideas on this. Yours are, simply put, the ones I jettisoned some time ago, so they hardly will fit in the center of any presentation of what I am thinking. Why not put up your own page on those solutions instead of trying to inject them into a page that explicitly is rejecting them? I simply am trying to keep this space clean as it is a very complex page. Your efforts just muddy it up in sense and look. We have a different approach on this and are not likely to see things the same. That is of no concern to me. But, cleaning up this wiki after you on a constant basis is too much for me.
The wiki is certainly for collaborative efforts, but not all on one page? I also must state that it is clear that we have no collaboration on this point. You adapt the ImageButtonBean approach and I used and rejected that. I am presenting a series of new approaches. You continue to put the old approach right in the middle of the wiki. That is not collaboration. We are not going to collaborate here. We disagree, apparently. That is okay. Part of the wiki is presenting alternative ideas, I would think. Why won't you let me do that in peace?
Is there no place to present alternative solutions to what you like, without you putting in what you like in those places? That is the difficulty. I appreciate all you have done and I appreciate the ImageButtonBean solution too, although I am certain it is outmoded and vastly inferior. Like I said, I have no animosity towards you. All I am is upset at having to clean up the messes. Hopefully this will be a new day. I don't want to get too huffed up about your changes, or the wiki will be nuked.
Michael McGrady
Niall Pemberton wrote:
OK Contact me off list if you wish, however....
I respected what you requested in the "FiveMultipleButtonsSolution" wiki page and all I did was add two links which were related to the subject - I added no opinions, just the links which is what you suggested people should do. You then added opinions on that page (seems to me you should have put them on the comments page you set up and asked others to use?) and you also put references to me all over the page. I was not happy with you making reference to me so last night I went through removing all those references. If you hadn't put my name all over that page then the only thing I would have changed was adding the two links to alternatives.
The whole idea of a wiki is a collaborative effort - but you seem to want your own personal space which no-one else should touch, maybe if thats the case then you should go put it on your own blog and just provide a link to it directly from the wiki. If you do, please though, don't include any reference to me - just tell people what your opnions are.
I also don't understand why you constantly resort to personal attacks on me - I haven't done that to you. For example in this message why do you say "without much knowledge of this area" - whether its true or not, its unecessary and rude.
Niall
----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael McGrady" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Struts Developers List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 3:16 PM Subject: Struts Wiki Etiquette: Niall's Help
I am trying to make the wiki on multiple buttons readable, despite being detailed and long. I have had to spend quite a bit of time doing that because Niall comes behind me and changes things in ways that effectively confuses the issue.
I would contact him directly on this, but he has asked me to not do that.
You added solutions which I was trying to avoid, Niall, to the wiki. Then, in order not to confuse the reader, I added small critiques of the links you provided. Now you have moved the critiques to places where they make no sense and have altered my words similarly.
Is there any sense to this or am I completely captured by Niall's status and incapable of making this wiki remain readable? If there is no way to keep this wiki safe from Niall, I would rather remove it altogether and just provide a link to a place he cannot rearrange at his whim and without much knowledge of this area.
Michael McGrady
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