Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 8/17/02 12:30 AM, "Russ Allbery" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> If Google were actually responsive, it would be usable. It's probably >> the best available one. > You just don't like blondes. (more correctly, you're already looking > forward to when web services turn them into redheads...) Maybe you could crank the arrogance down a few notches here? You're not the only technical person who has some experience working with non-technical users and some glimmerings of what they might like or not like, you know. I know web interfaces are all the fad now, mostly because for many problems they're the 50% solution and worse is better (for fairly undstandable and sound reasons). That doesn't mean they're a panacea, even for unexperienced users. They're another interface choice. Some people prefer webmail clients; many people don't. Some people who prefer them do so primarily because of the convenience of access and just put up with the interface and the slowness of access. Some of the people who prefer them prefer them for reasons that have nothing to do with the user interface and everything to do with their confusion about the idea of launching multiple applications to "access the Internet." And some of the people who prefer them do so because they want to keep all their mail on a remote server for various reasons, such as privacy concerns, and IMAP isn't an option for them. Those people who really do prefer the interface will, again, want web archives that have the same interface as their preferred mail client. So if their preferred mail client is Hotmail, then those people will be well-served by a traditional web-based mailing list archive. If it isn't, they won't be. I think you can get there with read-only IMAP folders, down the road. If that becomes a popular protocol for providing mailing list archives, some of the web mail systems will start offering support for it. > But they're also comfortable with the browser interface That depends on how they read their mail. If they read their mail with a webmail reader, then yes, they are. If they read their mail with something else, then no, they're not, *not for reading mail*. They're not used to a browser interface exactly; they're used to a *web page* interface, which comes with a bunch of assumptions of how you navigate and what sort of information you're looking at. If your mailing list is a mailing list to send out web pages, then a web page archive works pretty well. HTML announcement lists and that sort of a thing fit into that paradigm quite well. If your mailing list is a list for mail messages, then you're doing a transformation of a mail message into a web page, and users are used to dealing with mail in their mail client are having to learn a new *mail* interface to deal with the mailing list archives. There's one thing I know extremely well. The vast majority of users *hate* learning a new mail interface. This is why we still have (very non-technical) users who use mm, despite the fact that it's a horrible mail reader by modern standards and can't even understand MIME. They've been using mm since TOPS-20, and that's what they understand. Just because it's in their web browser doesn't mean it's a familiar user interface. Any complicated web application (and a halfway decent mailing list archive with good search capability and support for threading *is* a complicated web application) is essentially a brand-new user interface. It's built on top of standard building blocks, which makes it easier to learn just like interfaces built on the standard look and feel of a desktop platform are easier to learn, but there's still a learning curve compared to giving them their archives inside their mail client. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
