Re: Sound effects

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 14:45 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 12.12.08 11:55, Iain * (iaingnome gmail com) wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Marc-André Lureau
> > <marcandre lureau gmail com> wrote:
> > 
> > > And all the sound can link to the same sound, if what you want is a
> > > single sound (although I would never do that)
> > 
> > Sorry, I didn't notice this...
> > No, I wouldn't want to do that either
> > Because the sound would not be emitted at a good time
> > If you think that is what I wanted then you misunderstood me.
> > 
> > I want sound emitting to mean something predictable.
> > Currently it means multiple different things.
> > It can mean you did something, something succeeded, something failed,
> > something unexpected happened, you're required to do something,
> > something expected happened...and the occurances of these sounds is
> > arbitrary and at the whim of the people who came up with the naming
> > spec.
> > 
> > I want a single meaning for when sound is emitted.
> > To be honest, I don't really care what that sound sounds like
> > it could be a duck or frog (like the mac has) for all I care[1].
> 
> Come one. First you claim the list of defined names is too large. Then
> you claim it is incomplete. Then you want only a single sound for
> all. Now you want to distuingish the events. Hey, make up your mind!

These are not contradictory in the slightest.  (And "Hey,
make up your mind!" is hardly a constructive way to have
a conversation.)

Anybody here who's done serious work with DocBook knows
that DocBook is both too large and incomplete.  It has
400+ elements, which is just too many to keep in mind
and choose from when you're writing a document.

It has that many elements because it tries to be very
specific in many cases.  It has specific elements for
various types of user interface controls, for example.
But it's incomplete because it doesn't have an element
for every type of control you'd ever use.  It is only
incomplete with respect to the level of specificity
it is trying to provide.

Now, if you have a generic element for all UI controls,
you make the format smaller and more complete in one
fell swoop.  (DocBook has such an element, by the way,
but it's deprecated.  Sigh.)

Incompleteness due to too much specificity gets in the
way when you're trying to find the thing you need for
the situation at hand.  If you have more generic things,
it's more likely there's a thing that covers what you
want.  But if you have more specific things, you often
find a number of things that are like what you want,
but not quite.

Now, the sound naming specification handles this more
nicely than DocBook, because it follows the inheritance
model from the icon naming specification.  But without
an assurance that a sound theme will provide the base
sounds (e.g. complete.wav), the problem still persists
for application developers.

--
Shaun