[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] alternate interfaces, Re: Documentation Interest Group Meeting: Today, December 5

[Dan Scott]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 4:26 PM, Jason Etheridge <jason at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> <snip>
>> Since there is now a unified volume/copy editor, I thought it might be
>> necessary to now offer two sets of docs for adding holdings since some
>> libraries may continue to use the traditional volume and copy creator while
>> others may move to the unified one. Does this make sense?
>
> This reminds me; alternate interfaces are something I don't think
> anyone necessarily wants to see a lot of (since it can be a burden to
> documenters, testers, and maybe even to users), so if folks ever tend
> to favor one interface over another, we may want to think about
> deprecating and eventually removing the lesser used interfaces.  Maybe
> we can sound folks out during the Evergreen conference, etc.

+1 to reducing complexity (not only for documentation, but for testing
and maintenance and support) by phasing out redundant UIs - a good
start!

See "The Question of Preferences" starting halfway down
http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html for a classic dissection of
the problems caused by too much configurability. YAOUS-a indeed!