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Re: Will "AT&T" fit in a string attribute with maxLength="4"?

• To: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>,"'Xml-Dev \(E-mail\)" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Will "AT&T" fit in a string attribute with maxLength="4"?
• From: "Bob Foster" <bob@o...>
• Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 13:32:05 -0500
• References: <2DB6C70226E0D21190C40008C70D8FCF0F9394B8@NBXHEX1> <000c01c31f57$e3c462a0$6401a8c0@tbp1> <01ef01c31f6d$50be9730$4bc8a8c0@A...>

From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>
>From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
>> All things considered, this still sounds like a bug in Spy.
>
>To be fair, sometimes design decisions which make an editing/validating
product generally
>pallatable in use can be (or be perceived as) bugs from the user's POV at
the end of the day.
>The very thing that makes an editor rich makes a validator poor, as the
song says. When
>editing, at one moment a user is focused on some issues (say, elements) but
not others
>(say, special characters), then later the user is focused on another set of
issues.

I'm not so sure this is a real tradeoff. Validate means validate. To be
truly helpful, an editor should come as close as possible to the standard
definition. Since documents are nearly always ill-formed or invalid during
(text) editing, an editor can't/shouldn't prevent the user from making
errors and it may, based on the user's choice, pretend for a time that
errors aren't there, but in the long run, it helps no one to not flag actual
errors, and flagging non-errors is truly unproductive.

>One of the major distinguishing differences between editors is how the
provide progressive
>or piecemeal or partial or feasible validation. But the tradeoff is that
the more options a vendor
>provide a user to filter out things they are not interested in at one time,
the more they are required
>to know. People want a big single button marked "Validate", but they also
don't want to get
>swamped with too much information, and they also want to trust their tools.

Yup.

Bob

>(One nice approach for having cake and eating it is to provide a sortable
list of all found
>errors, so that the user can just look at the ones they are interested in,
grouped.)
>
>Cheers
>Rick Jelliffe
Topologi, Pty. Ltd.

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• References:
  • RE: Will "AT&T" fit in a string attribute with maxLength="4"?
    • From: "Foster, Warwick" <Warwick.Foster@a...>
  • Re: Will "AT&T" fit in a string attribute with maxLength="4"?
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
  • Re: Will "AT&T" fit in a string attribute with maxLength="4"?
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

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