I went through the Use Cases and Requirements we developed on our July 25
meeting, and posted a preliminary Use Case/Requirements document for the
first stage of what we're trying to do:
http://bootstrap.org:8080/OHS/E-mail%20Use%20Cases%20and%20Requirements
I want to address some of the discussion that has been going on recently,
but that's going to have to wait a few days until I have more time. In
the meantime, I want to make two quick comments here.
First, as several people have pointed out to me, we keep confusing the
long-term and short-term goals of the project. The short-term goal --
stage one, upon which we agreed on July 25 -- is very simple: we're
developing an e-mail archiving system that provides fine-grained
addressability and supports multiple views. One could almost call it a
better hypermail, although I hesitate to call it that, because this
initial step will give us capabilities to do so much more. The document I
posted is meant to address only this very first stage.
Second, I think many people are putting the cart before horse regarding
our client requirements. I feel like we're regressing into a "Netscape/IE
4 are obsolete; long live XML-compliant browsers" religious war. What we
need to do is develop a user interface that meets the requirements of
stage one, and a viewing engine that supports this interface.
My recommendation would be, instead of arguing about whether or not we
should assume, say, fully compliant CSS Level 1 browsers, start by mocking
up sample user interfaces and views. These could be done in PhotoShop or
in HTML or in XHTML or whatever, just as long as we all can get a visual
idea of what you're proposing.
These mockups can then serve as the centerpiece for discussing other
system specifications, like what level of minimal browser support we will
need for this first revision. This approach also potentially gives us the
best of both worlds. For example, suppose Joe develops a really cool
UI that requires Mozilla, while Nicholas develops a really cool UI that
supports Netscape/IE 4. Because of our architecture, we can retain both
set of UIs as part of our system, and send the appropriate UI based on the
user's browser.
-Eugene
-- +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+ | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they | +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:57:50 PDT