ANSTHRLD - Webbed ILoIs

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

Thanks for the conversin to HTML, Francois!

I suspect that the muckin' big size of the DOC file is that the images
are bitmaps instead of GIFs or JPGS, no?


I had a sudden flash of what's either inspiration or a lot of useless
work for someone: Robotarius.  Put up the ILoI on a Web page, with
text entry boxes under each one (with another box somewhere saying who
it was who was commenting).  You'd enter commentary in the text box.
After you clicked Submit, it would put your commentary up on the page,
so others could see it and comment on comments.  It would
automatically be collated.

Features / Benefits / Detriments:

- Retiarius would still collate other comments in too, because
  - not everyone has a computer
  - those that do may not have a browser or may not care to use it
  - we don't want to discard or denigrate commentary that doesn't come
    in via this form

- Lack of comments on comments are the only major flaw I can think of
  in the current system, aside from the eternal problem of not enough
  commenters.

  I *like* to do comment-on-comment, because
  - it's much easier (I'm addressing one specific issue)
  - it can be important ("no, there's a precedent that says it's not a
    conflict").

  - it could be educational.  I learned by osmosis, asking questions
    in commentary meetings.  This would be a bulletin board, where
    people could ask about why such-and-so isn't a problem, or ask
    how to conflict-check it.

    On the other hand, in-person commentary is good because there's
    instant feedback and because someone can point to a PictDict or
    whatever.  In mailing list discussion, the questions go to every
    person right away, so they're prompted to reply.  Questions on a
    Web page depend on people getting there and seeing it, so it would
    be slower.

- Retiarius would still have to edit, in case a question turned out
  not to be of any particular interest, or there was off-topic
  digression.  (Us?!)

- On the other hand, having people comment in ignorance of others'
  comments may be a benefit.  For some armory "Or, a narfing-iron
  tenne", suppose Francois posts that there's a conflict with "Or, a
  narfing-iron tenne and in chief two badpipes gules".  Other people
  look it up and find that yep, it is a conflict, and stop.  That info
  is sent back to the submitter, who redesigns to avoid that conflict
  via "Or, a narfing-iron tenne and in base a cromhorn" ... but it
  turns out that because nobody bothered to be thorough, "Or, a
  narfing-iron tenne" was a conflict all along, so it bounces again.

  However, this is a problem with the current system, if people stop
  with the first conflict.  We could emphasize that it's important to
  keep going.

- The submitter could more easily see the snarky remarks.  This is
  good or bad, depending on how you look at it.

- I don't like Web interfaces in general.  I have some nice powerful
  text editors, but on Web pages all you can do is type and delete,
  and deleting conveniently often needs a mouse.

- If Asterisk was willing and able, there could be color scans on the
  Web page, so we could comment on the tinctures as well.

The fundamental question is whether anyone else would think it at all
valuable, enough to justify any such effort.

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel is tmcd at jump.net; if that fail,
    tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work account.
"To join the Clueless Club, send a followup to this message quoting everything
up to and including this sig!" -- Jukka.Korpela at hut.fi (Jukka Korpela)
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