Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: revision control for documents (was plug-in foo)

[Aaron Bentley]

On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 21:07, Tom Lord wrote:

[snip]
> We had a name for that kind of design in the UI group I worked with.
> Actually it was a name that I coined.  We called it "not lying to
> users".
> 
> "Not lying to users" meant not trying to create "false abstractions".
> 
> An example of a "false abstraction" would be an editor in which 80% of
> the time you hide from the user that there's a markup language at all
> -- just show them text that looks certain ways -- but then the reality
> that there's an underlying markup language "seeps up" into the
> interface in annoying and confusing ways.

Joel Spolsky would call this a "leaky abstraction":
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

> The alternative to lying to users is "presenting the truth to the
> user" -- e.g., letting them know that there's a markup language;
> helping them to learn the markup language; helping them to perceive
> the GUI editor as exactly what it _really_ is: a tool for manipulating
> source texts in the markup language.

WordPerfect and Dreamweaver don't lie to the user-- the markup language
is viewable if you want it-- but their default view is a graphical one.

This is more of a "lies-to-children" approach.  The notion is that you
teach a simpler idea that is mostly right first, to prime the mind for a
more complex idea that is more correct later.  (Applied to science:
teach newtonian physics before the theory of relativity.)

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.