On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 09/02/2014 01:35 PM, pi zero wrote:
(1) It's very easy to use. (2) it naturally promotes incremental learning.
I'm sorry, but both of those assertions are not only wrong, but profoundly misguided.
At first I thought, well, seems safe to assume /we're/ not going to agree. And of course I still think that. But it sees there may more going on here than a disagreement about the user experience, in that we may have somewhat different understands of what we're talking about.
I would be surprised if it represented even a tenth
of a percent of today's Internet users.
This is mostly simple disagreement, but may edge into the second point; my first thought was that you're giving people too little credit... but on second thought, I wonder if you're, more specifically, assigning discredit to people that belongs to accidental characteristics of the interface. And then there's this last bit:
The only reason templates were a success[1] is because the original
wikipedian self-selected by their ability to grok and manipulate those concepts.
[1] Furthermore, even /whether/ templates were a success is highly debatable. If I look at the current mess, and the troubles caused by it, I doubt it. I'd argue that we did great things /despite/ templates as a mechanism, not because of it.
Now, just incidentally, besides skepticism on the point about self-selection, I'm also not altogether convinced it /matters/ either way since the result was hugely successful. But what really gave me mental whiplash was the apparent supposition that someone here thinks templates were a success. I'm satisfied we disagree on the manageability of elementary template syntax, but... templates a success? I'm not sure where we're talking past each other, but it's happening somewhere.