[Mailman-Developers] The Philosophy of Web Use.

[Brad Knowles]

Ethan wrote:

> Have you used http://wiki.list.org/ ? Is it "flat out broken" or "slow
> and distracting"? I find it has a few bugs, but mostly it works well.

I have tried to use Confluence, yes.  Not all that successfully, however. 
It seems to be an improvement over TWiki, but that's not saying much.

> Here's a specific example that works well for me: Does the drag/drop of
> boxes on the customized google home page not work for you? You don't
> have to sign in to try it, and it allows drag/drop reordering for me in
> Safari just fine, and way more intuitively than resubmitting the page
> after clicking on buttons.

I had never tried that particular feature of Google, but I'm not
particularly impressed by it.


And if the choice is to send a whole bunch of stuff to the other end and
then hide most of it or to simply not send it at all, I vote for not
sending it.

If you read the Slashdot article that I referenced in another message, I
believe you'll find that it's the Google people who are saying that the
bottleneck in most cases is not the network, but is actually the amazingly
low-end Pentium machines that people have at home, and that we (they) have
to work hard to avoid overtaxing those systems.

> So you have no constructive feedback, nor a sufficiently detailed
> critique that I can even address your concerns. I'm not sure what you
> would have me do with your advice, beyond my already existing commitment
> to make the page work without JavaScript.

It's not just making sure that the page will work without JavaScript. 
It's also making sure that the JavaScript which is added is relatively
simple and unlikely to break when viewed/used in unexpected or unknown
browsers, and will be likely to continue to work in all future browsers
and browser versions.

It's also not pushing things too far, because I might end up browsing a
Mailman admin site with my Treo 650 with JavaScript turned on, across a
slow spotty GPRS connection, and I still need this 320x320 screen to be
useful when trying to do some emergency list maintenance away from home.

> * IE 5+, Mozilla (any), Safari from 1.0+ and any other KHTML browsers,
> JAWS 6+, Opera 6+, Lynx, Links. All in any combination of
> Images/CSS/JavaScript off/on.

You've got PCs on the brain.  Or maybe not PCs, but certainly desktop
computers.  Don't forget about Opera Mini, Brew, the web browser on Palm
from Access, the other web browsers for common PDA and phone devices,
etc....

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.