[Seaside] HTML method naming conventions

Sebastian Sastre ssastre at seaswork.com
Fri Apr 11 21:38:14 UTC 2008


> >  Given to use Seaside you have to have a good understanding 
> of HTML where is
> > the advantage in translating tags to different message 
> name? Renaming for
> > the sake of being 'Smalltalkish" just makes entry for existing web
> > developers that much more difficult. How many people have 
> tried to send #tr
> > and #td?
> 
> + 1  I would prefer to use html tag names, td, tr, a.
> 
> And seaside adds to the html language disconnect by using #url: for
> src and href attributes.
> 
> --
> 
> Edward Stow

Hi,

	-1 here. The short answer of why is: developer's usability. 

Long answer is:

Smalltalk is a machine born to be heuristic. One of the main **design** goals
was to approximate computers to our way of thinking so we are able to tell them
how to behave *our way* instead of their way.

Two designers when talk about anchors don’t say "a" they say "anchor" so why the
computer *have* to force designers to talk about the same subject differently
when they can do it the same? Is due to typing laziness? Then that’s a usability
problem unrelated to semantics. To paliate that we have tools like eCompletion.
There is not other reason to write programs in an encoded encoded style when
they are intended to be read and maintained by humans. Those programs only
*secondarily* are run by machines. Besides that, to intentionally encode it is a
fact bounded to violation of the "Recognition rather than recall" principle
which every so called designer should know and make hes/shes best to make it
prevail.

In the long run we need usability as much as we can. To fight against that leads
to nowhere.

	cheers,

Sebastian Sastre
Ref:  http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html



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