Re: PROPOSAL: Compliancy Level Standardization, Revision 1.

[Bowie Poag <bjp primenet com>]

> Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com> wrote:
> >  o  Levels listed in descending order, highest esteem first. Level 1
> >     Compliant Apps are held in the highest regard, where as Level 5
> >     are held in the lowest.
> 
> to be honest, I don't have the slightest idea what exactly you mean with
> "highest/lowest esteem". could you try to get more precise what that means?
> where are the core demands, where the fringe features?

"Esteem"  =  A developer would rather have all his apps be Level 1,
             versus all of the being crappy Level 5's. That is, there
             is more esteem in 1, than 5.. Not the other way around.
	     1 must always be the highest, for future expansion. If
	     its not done this way, what means "great" now, will
	     end up being "medicore" later. This is a (tm) Bad Idea.
	     1 for highest esteem, 5 for lowest is the way to go.

> 
> also, I don't see "future expansion" as an argument. if the compliance level
> system is so messed up that we have to introduce whole new levels, the whole
> thing is probably so broken that it should be dropped.
 
Ahhh, but what if new GUI/desktop concepts come along, and people want
them mandated in the interface? Now what do you do? The Compliancy Levels
WILL and *must* be revised in the future. Its unavoidable, no matter how
hard you try to do it right the first time, theyre going to be changed by
future users. Look at ANY os'es style guide specifications over time.
Theyve all been changed to meet the demands of current users. The smart
ones constructed their documents to allow this to be done easilly, and not
break definitions, or become inconsistant.

 Sometime, 5-8 years from now, there will be another Tom Vogt, another
John Sheets, another Dan Kaminsky, and another Bowie J Poag, busy
working on V7.0 of the Style Guide. Theyre going to need to make revisions
to OUR style guide which reflect the needs of users in 2005 or whenever.

They ARE going to play with our levels, inevitably.. So, we must make it
easy, and extensible. The way to do this is by ALWAYS having Level 1 be
the "most esteemed" level.. Its the brass ring everyone is trying to go
for. If the future requires more levels, they can simply tack on Level 6,
or Level 7, or 8 without screwing up the current system in place. By your
way, you are forced to completely re-define everything from 1 thru N,
where N represents however many levels are needed.

Trust me on this one.. I had this exact same debate when we were working
on InSight's SG..And it took them a while for them to "get it". :) By the
time it clicked in their heads what I was talking about, a good 3 days had
gone by..and this was live, not on a mailing list. :)

Compliancy levels need to be done in descending order, from 1 at the
highest, to 5 at the lowest. Not the other way around. Im afraid youre
painting yourself into a corner by doing otherwise.

Bowie