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 _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
