[kde-guidelines] Licenses

[Aaron Seigo]

On October 3, 2004 14:07, Frans Englich wrote:
> You will have to explain to me why the ability to explain usability advise,
> is equivalent to writing it in the guidelines.

simple: efficiency.

i'd rather developers who ask "why", which they do and which is a valid 
inquiry, can discover it for themselves rather than me (or anyone else) 
having to explain it for the Nth time. 

i'd also love to have a place where those who are getting involved in 
usability can see the "why's" and "wherefore's" as well, thereby getting the 
reasoning and perhaps even improving their own understanding of things. 

it also lends itself to knowledge retention, which in turn is directly 
relatable to maintability. when someone else takes over the guidelines, 
having those rationals right there will be immensley helpful.

then there's cross-guideline cooperationg. think about it from the perspective 
of us reading the accessability guidelines. there are things i'll read there 
that i won't understand the why behind; once i understand the why i can 
better reflect those needs in the HIG. the same is likely to be true for the 
AG and CIG authors.

of course, the rationals will be in parallel and not in-line: they are not 
useful to the general case. but they are invaluable to many other cases. 
think of it as guideline usability ;-)

> that rationales /in/ the guidelines, and make it available to the reader.

what would we possibly gain by not making it available? you've noted that it 
will take longer should we include the rationals, and you are quite right.

i would consider the guideliness complete even if there isn't a "rational" 
section for every part of the guidelines. some points will be blazingly 
obvious or even completely without rational (e.g. the "we just need to choose 
one standard way" decisions), but for those points that would benefit from 
it, it would be nice to be there.

> If the rationales wasn't in the HIG, it would be like GNOME's or Apple's
> HIG, AFAICT.

we want to do something better than, not equal to, their efforts. just because 
someone else did it "this good" doesn't mean we can't do it "this good plus 
more".

> So your comments about "If you can't explain why a certain 
> usability advice is given you have no business of writing guidelines" and
> "been the whole reason why corporations and individuals like myself have
> joined in the first place", knocks down quite a lot of people.

these people are fully capable of explaining their rationals. they simply 
chose not to capture this information in their HIGs (well, the GNOME HIG does 
do such things in places). this loss of information is unfortunate.

> I didn't propose to have it changed, as in "I don't expect this to be
> discussed, or followed up",

then why post it at all? what's the point if it isn't to be discussed? we're 
here to discuss and make the guidelines as good as possible. that's the whole 
point.

> so you don't have to iron out people disagree 
> with me. Just relax and don't comment on it since you win anyway: the
> outcome will be the same, regardless of if it's discussed or not.

Frans, are you just pouting here, or are you trying to say something 
important? if the latter, could you re-phrase it so even i can understand 
what you're trying to say?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo