Le lundi 10 octobre 2005 à 09:58 -0500, Steve Kopischke a écrit : > on 10/10/05 09:00 'Nicolas Mailhot' wrote: > > >Le lundi 10 octobre 2005 à 14:19 +0100, Alexandro Colorado a écrit : > > > > > >>You can always uncheck it... > >> > > > >ROTFL. I hope you're not serious. > >Bad and dangerous defaults have no place in mature software. I think it > >was Sun which spent lots of $$$ in usability studies to make the Gnome > >people understand this. > > > >"you can always uncheck it" have never been a serious excuse. > > > > > > > I hope *you're* not serious. The purpose of defaults is to establish a > baseline of application behavior, a known quantity.
Not only this. A known broken baseline is of little use. The purpose of defaults is to provide a baseline that will need the smallest number of changes to be useful to end-users. > Simply because you > insist on the default value being different from the established > programmatic value, it does not necessarily follow that others share > your version of wisdom. A paramount consideration when writing any sort of software is it should not knowingly destroy user data. This default is a disaster *because* it destroys user data by writing changes even when the user didn't request it (simply loading a document that has been created with a different word processor version will create "changes" OO.o will want to autosave) > Calling an "option" an "excuse" is just whining laziness masquerading as > expertise. Change the value and move on. I stand by what I wrote. Making a behaviour optional is no excuse for not thinking through what the default behaviour should be. Unloading the thinking on the user is just developer laziness. Arguing about what the value should be is constructive. Declaring "Change the value and move on" OTOH deserves more dirty words than I am able to muster in English. You're not doing the project any service by reacting like this. -- Nicolas Mailhot
