Re: Forums

-----Original Message----- 
From: Edward O'Connor 
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 12:11 PM 
To: www-style@w3.org 
Subject: Re: Forums 

>Marat Tanalin wrote:
>
>> Why are you considering existing forum-engines solely? Why couldn't W3
>> create such forum engine from scratch? No financing at all?
>
>Sorry, I thought we were comparing one existing solution with other
>existing solutions. If we compare any existing mailing list software to
>some theoretical ideal forum software, of course the theoretical ideal
>forum software is better, by definition.
>

I would put it this way:

We are comparing two different ways of accessing the discussion. 
First one - by mail and so using various unknown mail clients.
Second one - through unified Web App interface where we are
at the same page.

Problem with first one (mail access) is that 
not all mail applications are suitable for that kind of
discussion. The discussion requires particular style of 
quoting - to be recognized by other people and their 
mail clients.  On mobiles for example choice of  mail 
applications is quite limited. To be honest it is limited 
on desktop either. 

It appears that the list is tend to use fixed font formatted
messages. Far not all mail clients are good with that.
ASCII "art" and "drawing" are used quite a lot.

And that is the problem - while writing the message you
cannot be sure that receivers will read the message
in the way you have written it.

I suspect that web forum that has plain <textarea> for 
the message body is better. All of us will see massages 
rendered in the same way and send in the same way too.

-- 
Andrew Fedoniouk

http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Saturday, 7 January 2012 18:51:44 UTC