[Tb] Re: Tb digest, Vol 1 #74 - 15 msgs

I'm quoting from the whole thread because I get it digest-ed...

>Unless, of course, I am the odd one here. Is there anyone
>listening who, when reading that prevSibling gives you "the next
>older sibling of the current note" knows that this means the one
>to the left rather than the one that is actually older?

I think that you might be *an* odd one, though not *the*. It is
confusing, but this makes perfect sense to me... and to those who
went to my high school, presumably. We made outlines in something
that doesn't *have* date attributes, and was linear --paper-- and
hence "older" meant "the thing you put in the outline before this
line", which meant anything above it.

When I got to college and hung out around computer geeks, that
terminology was canonized for me. When you're reordering things in
many contexts without an automatically assigned date attribute,
'older' means 'previous in the order' and 'younger' means 'later in
the order'.

'next' and 'prev' are pretty sensible in anything but map view, which
might be the problem there. In map view... well, how *do* you assign
next and previous? It's going to be arbitrary no matter what, and
since we read left to right (well, in the US), this made sense to me.
Admittedly, a few pixels up or down can mess that up.

It's worth a mention in the manual, but I don't think that it's as
counter-intuitive as you feel to most people coming from a background
without databases (auto-assigned fields) or Tinderbox itself.

>I imagine most people would "reach for" the "oldest" term to get such notes=
>=2E I predict that "they" will be confused when they instead get the notes=
> from the top of the list.

That makes sense, but feels specialized to someone accustomed to
auto-assigned date attributes.

>Once you add that sort of metadata to the
>system, language that is intuitively understandable in a "pure"
>outlining context loses precision.

>Having the terminology chapter in the manual DOES help, but so would
>adding a word or two every time older/younger is mentioned.

>Either will preserve the precise domain terminology while still giving
>newbies and people outside of the outline business a leg up.

Good points! Now if *I* just had a few months to devote to writing...

--Scott
Received on Thu Mar 31 12:44:00 2005