Re: Proposal for First Draft of GNOME Style Guide 1.1

[Bowie Poag <bjp primenet com>]

> I found myself in pretty sharp disagreement with Bowie's claim that the
> Conformance rating guide was premature--it was an excellent contribution to
> the group, and should be seen as such.

It wasnt my intent to assert that the Compliance Level thing was a bad
idea for him to raise -- Just that the idea already exists, and discussion
of it would best be done at the conference, since its one of the primary
topics to be covered.

> 
> But then, I somewhat realized what he was getting at.  Lets say you're
> involved in a project coding some application, and before you've even
> established a namespace, people are contributing code.  On the one hand,
> it's great--people are contributing really good stuff.  But on the other
> hand, none of it works together, because everyone is using slightly
> different namespaces, radically different toolkits, possibly even different
> languages.  Even if you hack it together, it's going to compile HUGE, and be
> utter bloat.

"Openly developed" and "Uncontrolled development" are two totally separate
things. As I've said all allong, we can have an openly developed style
guide without having some uncontrolled riot where NOBODY is heard, among 
all the yelling.
 
> Bowie--and myself--don't want this happening to the style guide.  A
> framework needs to be developed, then design specs need to be grafted into
> the framework--this can't happen the other way around.

Agreed, totally.

> 
> The question is, of course, do in-depth proposals have a place on this
> group?  Do they mess with the framework too much?  Yes and no.  Huge
> proposals have a way of forcing us to evaluate or re-evaluate sections of
> the framework--that can slow us down and bug out our design, but it can also
> revitalize it.

I dont mind re-writes. If an idea is important enough to cause the
alteration of other sections, I have no problem going back and making the
appropriate changes. 

> I'm not sure of my opinion now.  I see both sides, but I fear for Bowie :-)
> I'm afraid y'all aren't going to understand his point, and are going to
> think he's some kind of Interface Nazi(he ain't).


Its the human way, to become frightened and sceptical when someone in a
position of authority is saying things which dont make sense to 100% of
the people. The people who dont understand it turn to ridicule and
assumption to comfort themselves, rather than simply ask for
clarifications. If I werent prepared to argue my stance on any paticular
item, I wouldnt have opened my mouth in the first place.

:)

Bowie