Re: PROPOSAL: Compliancy Level Standardization, Revision 1.

["Dan \"Effugas\" Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com>
To: Tom Vogt <tom@lemuria.org>
Cc: gnome-gui-list@gnome.org <gnome-gui-list@gnome.org>
Date: Wednesday, August 05, 1998 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: Compliancy Level Standardization, Revision 1.


>"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.


I'm gonna disagree with you here, Bowie.  An application developer's FIRST
priority is to achieve level one.  When you do the minimum, you get one star
out of five in ratings.  The more you do, i.e. the higher you ascend the
priority table, the more stars you get, the better your app, the more
compliance.

By the way :-)  C2 > C1 according to the orange book.

>
>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.


The levels must be mandated.  The skeleton should be pretty consistent with
Mandatory, Highly Recommended, Recommended, Optional.  As I've been saying
Experimental is a DIFFERENT STORY ALTOGETHER.

> 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.


Weird thought.

>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.


But, in many ways, that's what we've been arguing for all along.  By making
one a bare minimum, you can always push higher and higher and higher up on
the food chain.  By making one the maximum state you can get...well...what
happens if you want to surpass the minimum?  See what I mean?  Your logic is
off.

>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. :)


Welp, it'll take a bit of time here too, buddy.

>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.


Your order is good with apps that have authors that want to be less and less
compliant.  The original order is for authors who want to make their apps
better and better.

Which is superior?  I say the latter.
>