oasis-library-review — archive

[Robin Cover]

My FYI wasn't intended to launch any major or sideline discussions on file naming, but the following inline notes may provide useful followup. On Wed, 21 May 2008, Mary McRae wrote: > Hi Robin, > > No one is suggesting this as a specification name. Nor was I: my memo does not use the word "specification", and the Naming Guidelines apply to all resources installed in the OASIS Open Library. > And yes, I will continue to > argue that as long as desktop operating systems allow the creation of filenames > with spaces, that is what most users will do. Not that web documents should have > spaces or underscores in the filename, but that users, when creating files on > their desktop, will create documents with spaces in the filename since it makes > them more legible. It's a curious argument, though perhaps true for users who think that a filename formed from the first dozen or so characters from sentence one of a textual document "is probably OK as a filename." I have never been seduced into thinking that running prose sentence-style makes a good filename. > The filename itself is indicating placeholders for a date. > Now someone could gently suggest to Bob Beims or whoever created the template > that using DD-MM-YYYY or some other pattern might be more appropriate, but it > *does* make sense given the intent of the filename. > > When we roll out a system that *prevents* documents with spaces (or other bad > characters) in filenames, we will also *educate* users as to why they can't have > spaces in filenames, and how to create patterns that - while eliminating spaces > - also create meaningful filenames. You could start that education process now, > but as long as Kavi doesn't enforce it, it won't make a difference. You have to > time the education to the actual restriction for it to have the desired impact. Hopefully, contextual help in the application will provide the key locus for education: I never imagined needing to have an educational program for how to adapt to the OASIS Library paradigm shift. Analogy, which should work for all users who do online banking or use any forms-based applications. Most forms processing operates on constrained strings for some fields, e.g., a phone number. While one user might think that use of parenthesis characters enhances readability, +1 (972) 296-1783, if the field gloss says "enter only numeric characters and hyphens", the user can try all day, over and over again, entering SPACE, PLUS, LEFT-PAREN, RIGHT-PAREN -- and the submitting the form will result in failure, every time, for hundreds of attempts, until the user gets the picture. Same with filenames, which are similar to userID strings: if my userID is 'robincover' then probably 'r obin cover' will fail. Contextual help and rich hypertext should do the trick, I think. -robin Robin Cover OASIS, Chief Information Architect Editor, Cover Pages and XML Daily Newslink http://xml.coverpages.org/ > > Mary > > >>