Re: File Extension Madness

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 01:05 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > 1. A polite warning when it occurs, a dialog saying:
>
> warnings are annoying, and unnecessary in my opinion

Correction, in your technically _educated_ opinion.

Most word processor users are not very techincally aware. I know, I've
taught several and it's a long, long process just getting them to use
(let alone understand) things you might assume are simple such as styles
or even a format dialog. I taught one person who simply would not use
anything if it wasn't in the toolbar, things as silly as that.

> as far as I'm concerned giving a document an incorrect file extension is a
> rare case.

I would not call it improbable or rare. AbiWord defaults to using .abw,
but I do not think it is unrealistic - bearing in mind many users find
the terms 'word processor', 'Word', and '.doc' to be synonymous with
each other - to think that some technically unaware person might type
'myfile.doc' into the save-as dialog. I think that's a very *likely*
scenario. If you want AbiWord to be intuitive, you have to literally
think stupid and do the things that only somebody who is _ignorant_
would do. This is one of them.

> the way windows applications usually deal with this is that if you put the
> "filename.doc" in inverted commas you will get the literal filename and an
> extension will not be automatically added. Those who want the rare case
> of naming a document incorrectly should be willing to go through an extra
> step.
>
> I'm sure this can be figured out.

And some people believe everybody should use Debian. It can be "figured
out" easily enough. Right? Wrong. Just like many people like their
spelling mistakes to be highlighted automagically, rather than manually
activating the spell checker, I'm sure many users would appreciate
AbiWord preventing them from making a mistake that will simply confuse
the hell out of them and think, "this AbiWord thing is problematic."

You might find such a warning annoying. But it's a one-time only
annoyance for you - you use the option to disable it (given in both the
suggestions) and you are happy thereafter. That's 2 seconds of your
time, in order to save hours of agony for somebody else.

Is that really not a worthwhile trade-off?

-- 
- Charlie
Charles Goodwin <charlie@vexi.org>
Online @ www.charlietech.com