Re: [HIG] Another alternative

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 21Oct2001 05:11PM (-0700), Adam Elman wrote:
>  So at the 
> risk of offending the folks who have already put in a great deal of 
> much-appreciated time and effort on the HIG, I will propose this: how 
> about we stop work on the HIG as currently written, and instead 
> decide to adopt I2GH as the current "mini-guidelines"?
>

I disagree on adopting the I2GH as it stands. It would have to go
through a process of revision and review before we could adopt it and
it's not clear to me if the author would be willing to make necessary
changes.

Other than that, I have no problem using it as a starting point,
except that it throws out the work of all the writers and forces the
reviewers to start the review process over from scratch on a new
document.

> The main reason I propose this is that I think IG2H is in a further 
> state of completion than the HIG, so it would save us a significant 
> amount of time to get to a final, postable version.  

If it's really easier to improve, fine, but it would knock the review
effort way back. How many weeks have we now spent on writing and
reviewing the previous document?

I think we'd be better off adopting parts of the other document on a
section by section basis where appropriate.

> I also think that it would be far, far better to have a single
> document than for us to post our HIG and for mpt to also post his,
> and thus have two often-conflicting documents both purporting to be
> GNOME HI guidelines.

We can't stop him from posting whatever he wants, but I think only the
HIG group as a whole and more generally the GNOME Usability Project
can publish an official GNOME HIG.

> If we decide to go this route -- and I'd like to have opinions in on 
> this as soon as humanly possible, as we need to get cracking either 
> way -- the next step would be for all of us to write reviews of I2GH 
> and submit them to this list, then discuss/debate changes.  

The main thing I dislike about this proposal, I guess, is the
midstream change of game plan. I think the current draft will end up
fairly decent if the various comments are taken into account. I think
throwing out the work so far and going with a completely different
approach will be demoralizing to current contributors (writers and
reviewers).

Regards,

Maciej