On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:

I highly doubt we'll get guaranteed backlash over such a minor shift in diff colors.

Heh....ha ha ha ha....(*uncontrollable laughter*)

Sorry, we will, but not because we should. Pretty much any design change anyone makes runs a substantial risk of endless bikeshedding.

While there are only a handful of people that care about the difference between database query strategies or parameter ordering in functions, pretty much everyone who interacts with the product will have an opinion about what it will look like. The colors, the ordering of the layout, the whole bit.

Calling it a bikeshed argument probably diminishes the importance of it a bit too much. The colors are important. What the user interface looks like matters a great deal.

The question, though, is what is the best way of dealing with user interface design issues? Many of us know that as non-designers, while we may have opinions on these things, they probably don't matter.[1] To make matters worse, there are going to be a lot of things that are truly a matter of taste. So, someone is going to need to make the call, because there's no way to arrive at "The Truth". We can do what most open source projects have done all along, which is to leave it up to the last developer that touches the code. That's a fine way of guaranteeing that what we end up with is going to be a hodge-podge of a lot of really bad stuff, combined with a few things that would be good if they were applied consistently and we committed to that particular direction. However, those good things won't be so good since they won't be applied consistently, since it'll be the taste of whoever happens to be around that will be applied.

No one has declared Brandon the dictator of these things, nor has anyone declared that we're throwing consensus out the window. However, it's hard to imagine Brandon being able to do anything other than this type of conversation if every decision he makes needs to be justified and discussed to the level that this diff color discussion happened. Furthermore, Brandon ends up dealing with the consequences for design decisions that he isn't consulted on, which is why we need to make sure that we consult him, and be prepared to go along even if we disagree. The "right" answer is often the most consistent answer, and our odds of achieving consistency go up if we defer to one person for issues that are matters of taste.

There's a few other issues tagged "design" in code review, and there are likely to be more: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/tag/design

Brandon is going to be weighing in on those as well, possibly making changes in the code based on his opinions on those. Can we please, oh please, not spin up a monster debate about each of those others? Please?

Thanks Rob [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-d...