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From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au>
>From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net>
>> All things considered, this still sounds like a bug in Spy.
>
>To be fair, sometimes design decisions which make an editing/validating
product generally
>pallatable in use can be (or be perceived as) bugs from the user's POV at
the end of the day.
>The very thing that makes an editor rich makes a validator poor, as the
song says. When
>editing, at one moment a user is focused on some issues (say, elements) but
not others
>(say, special characters), then later the user is focused on another set of
issues.
I'm not so sure this is a real tradeoff. Validate means validate. To be
truly helpful, an editor should come as close as possible to the standard
definition. Since documents are nearly always ill-formed or invalid during
(text) editing, an editor can't/shouldn't prevent the user from making
errors and it may, based on the user's choice, pretend for a time that
errors aren't there, but in the long run, it helps no one to not flag actual
errors, and flagging non-errors is truly unproductive.
>One of the major distinguishing differences between editors is how the
provide progressive
>or piecemeal or partial or feasible validation. But the tradeoff is that
the more options a vendor
>provide a user to filter out things they are not interested in at one time,
the more they are required
>to know. People want a big single button marked "Validate", but they also
don't want to get
>swamped with too much information, and they also want to trust their tools.
Yup.
Bob
>(One nice approach for having cake and eating it is to provide a sortable
list of all found
>errors, so that the user can just look at the ones they are interested in,
grouped.)
>
>Cheers
>Rick Jelliffe
Topologi, Pty. Ltd.
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