RE: [Usability]Nautilus criticism (Long)

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 03:53, Chris Altmann wrote:
> Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
[...]
> > Please try not to mutilate things that are not URIs to try 
> > and make them
> > into URIs.
> > 
> > The preferences:// disaster is bad enough without making it worse.
[...]

> Thought the point can be made that they are URIs. They indicate the
> location of a resource in a universally recognized format.

"if it weighs the same as a duck it's a duck"?

Not everything of the form xxx:// is a URI.  A URI must conform to
certain propertie.  The most important of these is that the *same*
URI can be used *anywhere* to get the *same* resource.

See [1] for a more detailed description of this, and for some of the
W3C's Technical Architecture Group's more recent thoughts on URIs,
see [2].

If the syntax was preferences://hostname/gconf-dur/gconf-key and I could
use that to read or change preferences on your desktop from here, you'd
have a better argument.  Of course, that would have security
implications :-) and does raise the question of why a specific network
protocol is needed that only works for preferences -- the people
I have met who were working on nautilus were bright engineers, many
with quite a bit of experience, and probably could have used HTTP or
XML-RPC here, or generalised to a gconf: protocol.  it seems really
poor design and is creating an unfortunate architectural legacy.

At least preferences://machine/... gives an error in Nautilus now,
so if it's a real URL scheme (is it registered?) then it's just a
useless one.  The preferences stuff in gnome2/nautilus seems buggy
enough in general to me that it'd be better just to delete it all
and stick with gnome-control-center.

Although, looking at it now, you can actually click on most of the
icons without error, at least until you get down to the pop-up
windows that have no title bar, or that pop up an error about no
viewer being available.  But clearly these windows are supposed
to be embedded in Nautilus.

At any rate we digress, and probably this isn't going anywhere useful
except to say, people are going to use things that look like a URI,
they need to make them be real URIs, and to understand what that
means.  Nautilus already has a severe case of "do it my way rather
than tring to fit in", where my belief is that it's better to have
consistency than to have one whizz-bang program that's slicker but
different from all the others.  So every change that makes nautilus
fit in better, even if it deletes features, is better in my book.

A file manager is a *lot* of work, and nautilus is pretty neat, by
the way, especially now Michael and others did all that work to make
it fast enough to use on a laptop.  But good things don't stay good
unless people work hard to keep them that way, so we need to remain
vigilant.

Sorry for a long post here.

Liam

[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture.html#fundamenta
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-webarch-20020830/#resources-uris

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001