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RE: best practice for providing newsfeeds ?

• To: 'Joshua Allen' <joshuaa@m...>, bob@w..., Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>, Michael Champion <mc@x...>, XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: best practice for providing newsfeeds ?
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 11:09:10 -0600

So the customer isn't pulling.  They are stumbling 
and grabbing onto the nearest thing to right themselves. 
Not surprising.

Do the editors come with online help, as in bubble help 
or something?

Could any of you fill in your tax forms without the 
instructions?  Would you if you knew the probability 
was very high that the IRS would reject them?

You are right if it means adding more fields to 
pick off all the possible error combinations, 
but some features are better than others and 
no form or editor should be fielded without 
user instructions for the semantics.

They will still put the garbage data in there, 
so, GIGO.

len


From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@m...]

> date that it was last modified. So, users get entries that appear  to
> be "old" even when they are "new." This confuses them. The issue here
> has *nothing* to do with data format -- it is a question of semantics,

My experience shows exactly the opposite; people report "new" when
actually a post is old.  But in any case, I fail to see how adding
another field will stop people from putting the wrong dates in those
fields -- the semantics of "pubDate" are remarkably clear, and people
still screw it up.  I would bet that in 99% of cases, people screw it up
because they don't know better, NOT because "pubDate is the only field
available and I really, really, want to store the last-update date in
the field".  

Solving user ignorance by adding more features is not very smart.

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