Re: sourceforge is nasty [ Was Re: [seul-edu] Request for Mailing list for Crosswords For Linux ]

[Manuel Gutierrez Algaba <irmina@ctv.es>]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, Joseph E. Arruda [mr.zenn] wrote:
> 
> While I agree that you *could* classify SF as a portal, I would hardly
> consider it pseudo-commercial.  The graphics are kept at a minimum for
> efficiency without making it look aesthetically bland.
> 

Ok, I'll give my full opinion about the matter, in fact this is
a matter of "ergonomics" ( the art of doing comfortable things for 
the people that uses them ). I think this is not off-topic at all,
because it affects us all, our web pages, the way we present 
our programms, our docs, all... It's a matter of thinking in the
other guy betterment. 

When I say pseudo-commercial what I mean is that the "thing" intends
too intentionally to gather people attention, moreover it does by
providing massive info, sometimes alien, and trying to hook visitors.
Is this bad? Yes, if people are looking for something different. 
Imagine somebody that goes to freshmeat to look at the news, he
wants the news, not 32Bitsonline, not andover news, and even I'd say
he doesn't want the news of the previous days. And freshmeat is 
rather austere in that matter. All that extra info has two nasty
results:
- too much info makes the fonts to grow almost unbearably small
- the time for loading the page lengthens till exasperation (some
connections in and out-USA are hellish slow ).

Which would be a better design ? 
A distributed, structured one, something like:
freshmeat.net/today.html
freshmeat.net/thisweek.html

different pages for different things, less flow of data but more
significative. 
This goes against "capitalists" or "internet-marketteers" that 
want to grab all the power possible, and that means __huge__ mega
pages with lots of publicity/info/power. 

Now about sourceforge, it's significative how much info it goes:
forums, bug trackers... and the worst of it is that most of the
times are empty! Ok, I understand which is the general "idea" of 
people and what a "corporate" image or site is. But from the 
"practical" point of view are better smaller/faster pages. 

Now about general doc, sometimes people include their .ps in 
the tarballs, me included, the nasty of it, it's that .ps exceed
by a factor of 3 the size of the rest of the document...

Other times, people put in the Internet huge files 11Mb, that 
are extremely difficult to get with low connections, is it so
difficult to split them ?

Other times, people do pages that occupies 100-200kb of text.

Non-comercial means rational, means user-friendly . That's why
Windows will never be better than Linux, think about a Visual prog,
let's say, Visual Shit ++ , there you've got the tree of objects,
all the info stuck into a small place, very impressive from 
the "corporate point of view" but sucking from the structured
point of view, that claims that "info is divided into chunks and 
can be filtered and modified endlessly by independent tools". Amen!!


Regards/Saludos
Manolo
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