Fwd: Re: tigert's mockups and HTML

[Tuomas Kuosmanen]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 14:24 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> The entire toolkit can be abused.  We live with just having a HIG and
> admonishing developers that make fugly/unusable apps.  Given that
> HTML/images _can_ be used for some impressive notifications that not
> only are pretty, but also packed with useful and relevant information,
> it seems a shame to ban them just because some developers may be
> tasteless or incompetent.

Yeah, this is exactly my point. Just because the spec allows you to eat
as many burritos as you can for a fixed price does not mean you should.

But it would be just silly to try to restrict developers by making a
spec that does not allow anything. That causes people to just reinvent
the wheel with the fancy chromed hubcaps themselves.. :)

It is not about overkill content. Like Sean said so well, it is about
small things to make a snippet of information easier to read and
understand with a glance. Having means to display rich content makes it
possible. Read "Envisioning Information" by Tufte if you want to
realize your designer skillz suck.. ;)

Besides, speed is not the worst issue here, if your friend becomes
online, it is not a disaster if the popup shows up a whopping 2 seconds
later. Or if your battery is about to end, it's not a question of
milliseconds. Memory usage is the bigger problem here, but we should try
to make Gecko more efficient then - having a HTML renderer is useful for
a lot of things. We have one in the help system too.

//Tuomas

-- 
Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert at novell.com>