Re: levels of compliance

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> "If you use a dialog box, you MUST provide a way to close it"
>
> "If you write an application, it SHOULD have complete online
> documentation, and if it does, it MUST use the GNOME documentation
> framework"

I'm beginning to like this more than the whole compliancy level model.
Compliancy levels offer a nice, concrete system for measuring how "stylish" an
app is, but it brings with it the price of added complexity and potential
confusion.  I mean really, who cares if a Help menu is more important than a
dialog's Apply button?  Compliancy ratings are only good when they're used to
compare differences in compliance for a single feature at a time, e.g. a
fully-stocked context-sensitive Help menu, as opposed to a simple
Help->About... menu.  It becomes meaningless when you try to apply it to
simpler one-or-the-other features, e.g. whether to call it Quit or Exit.  Or a
friendly initial window geometry.  Classifying these disparate style elements
into a single global linear scale quickly becomes piecemeal and ad hoc.  All
these style elements quite simply don't fit together.  Thus, it seems to me
that the issues of UI style are too complex to be described in anything but
natural human language.

Also, it's fun to be all officious and give ratings and measure compliancy, but
in the real world, who's gonna go to all the effort to tally up the scores of
every GNOME app they write?  The more straightforward the UI specs are, the
more they'll get used.  Pass/Fail.  Good/Not-Good-Enough.  If the UI Guidelines
don't result in consistently good UI's, then there's something wrong with them,
and the bugs should be ironed out to keep other UI faults from slipping
through.

Whew!  Talk about being officious.  (c:

> This is pretty much the same wording that is used by RFCs, and we may
> as well use it.  I certainly hope that the UI Guidelines will not be
> as dry reading as most RFCs, though :-)

Easy.  Just throw in some ASCII art and a handful of random quotes from famous
authors.  That should do the trick.  (c:  (Sorry, I just had to say
_something_.)

John