[pmwiki-users] Re: Redesigning the edit page - heirarchical menus?

[Radu]

Most of the time I am against allowing the computer to make decisions for 
me. Computers are good at automating things, not at making abstract choices 
like the one between minor and major - which to begin with is fuzzy even 
for people. Even if two people will agree in definition on what the 
minor/major distinction means, in practice they'll most definitely diverge 
(I can provide references for the HCI studies), and even if they did, it's 
rather difficult to keep it consistent, especially if you also have to 
remember to click a checkbox before saving. We're there to edit content, 
not to provide metadata on our edits. The metadata should not require extra 
clicks.

As for the hierarchical thing, personally I love hiding functionality in 
interfaces I build for myself. It keeps them clean and simple, lets me 
focus on the task. However, at this point I would NOT use a hierarchical 
menu, because I'm in the camp that wants the checkbox to be a button, and 
an extra click to open the menu would lose the wiki-wikiness of the 
buttons. Other issues:
* naive authors don't like to have hidden functionality
* dhtml dynamic menus are a pain to keep cross-browser compatible

So what's wrong with visually separating the buttons, as in

[Preview] Save: [Major][Minor][and re-edit]

or something like that? I saw people saying yay, but nobody said nay.

At 01:04 PM 4/28/2005, Stefano wrote:
>Il Thu, 28 Apr 2005 08:25:53 -0700, Dr Fred C <drfredc at earthlink.net>
>scrive:
>
> >Before one complicates the save routine, perhaps the major/minor option
> >could be automated by comparing the page size before and after.  If the
> >change is size is bigger than 15 chars or 5% (or whatever is set in
> >config as the trigger for major edit), then it's a major change,
> >otherwise it's automatically saved as a minor change.   One could even
> >still have the major/minor save option there, but most users probably
> >aren't going to bother making the determination, they'll just click
> >(major) save.  Sure, some major small character changes in wiki
> >directives might get missed, but most changes would likely get properly
> >determined and saved appropriately.
>
>I think it's a good idea, for me minor changes are typos correction,
>little formatting errors etc... and this would sure affect only few
>mount for text, maybe letting to set a parameter in config files allow
>single webmaster decide how much text change is a minor change (by %
>or # of chars)

Cheers,
Radu
(www.monicsoft.net)