Karl Fogel wrote:
[Eric Gillespie:]
> > I find it interesting that you acknowledge that the difference is
> > a subtle one but nevertheless think most users will have no
> > problem seeing and understanding the difference.
>
> Well, clearly by "subtle" I must have meant something subtly
> different from what you understood it to mean :-).
>
> By "subtle", I mean that for a person thinking concentratedly about
> this aspect of the interface, the difference between -r and without
> -r is non-trivial to explain. But that doesn't mean it's hard for
> users to learn, since learning happens in a different way than
> articulation. For example, if you try to explain rectangular mouse
> highlighting in words, it can sound quite complex -- yet people do
> it with no trouble.
"The set of characters selected consists of those whose bounding boxes
lie within a rectangle with one corner at the location where the
mouse drag began, and the opposite corner at the location where
the mouse drag ended. Operations on this selection work on a
virtual document consisting of just the selected characters;
when a line changes in length, material to the right of the
selected part of that line moves left or right accordingly." Doesn't
sound significantly harder to explain than ordinary highlighting
to me.
That's a digression, though. I think the statement "learning happens
in a different way than articulation" is more true for some people
than for others. For some, articulation is a vital stage in learning,
and difficulty in expressing what's going on precisely translates
directly into difficulty in learning.
I'm making no comment on the particular instance that's at issue
here, because I haven't looked at it at all. Just observing that,
in general, if something is subtle in Karl's sense then it is likely
to be harder for *some* people to learn.
--
g
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Received on Tue Oct 29 01:10:56 2002