Re: Proposed deletion of checkpoint on spawning windows

Hmm. I do it in emacs, which means that I have to explicitly look to remember
what is there - keeping more than one thing running at a time is not visually
viable (although I guess it would work if you didn't care what it looks lke -
I remember when Jason and I would work together his speech synthesiser was
always reading from the bottom of the page for another page, so we were
permanentyl a page out of sync. It meant we had to concrentrate pretty hard
to figure out what we were working on. (At Jason's working speech rate I
mights we well be deaf...)

If I get stuck in a window-opening frenzy I go behind the scenes and kill the
process - I can't manage it visually.

Having a lot of things open is a hassle for keeping up - it is probably a big
hassle for people with cognitive disabilities.

Hmmm.

So I think I'm close to agreeing that the user needs to be able to say "no,
don't open a new window. Does this mean "force the new window content into
this window instead"? Or "forget it"? which is what happens in lynx when I am
reading a page written by some clown who thinks
javascript:popout_window('some_uri') is a URI. (Should we specify an answer
to that question at all?)

Charles McCN


On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Al Gilman wrote:

  No.  This leaves the user with too much garbage-collection liability.
  Telling is not enough; the system must recognize that it opens new
  processes under the user's permission and it is at the user's discretion
  how closely they wish to hold that permission-granting.
  
  Living with a littered desktop is easy in a GUI world.  I do it in hardcopy
  all the time.  It is not a condition that an eyes-free user can operate in;
  her environment has to be neater and more tightly controlled.  The maximum
  degree of user control needs to be the base level and shortcuts added over
  that; not the other way around.
  
  Al

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 1999 15:02:16 UTC