[Xerte-dev] Re: Goal

Thu Apr 26 10:59:42 BST 2012

 The 'displaytext' child really confused me: I had no idea what to do with
it, and I know that for some people, that will be very off putting, so it's
remembering the FWS mantra

I think that we are all working towards the same end - that of enhancing
XOT and Xerte whilst keeping the users on board and happy.

Recent events, like Fay's comment regarding some documentation for the
Interactive Diagram (customHotspot) page, Julian's experience with the
"display text" child, and my own experiences in coming to grips with the
Interactive Diagram page (if my memory is correct I think Julian told me
how to use it in a response to my posting to the mail shortly after it
first came out ) and the Mapstraction and JMOL pages which I have never got
to work, have lead me to re-think the problem. I can't help feeling that
"keep it simple" is not the problem, but rather an attempt at a solution to
an unstated problem. I think the underlying problem is about "keeping it
intuitive".

In general something that is simple ought also to result in it being
intuitive. But the Interactive Diagram page is demonstrably counter
intuitive, though very simple to use. This is not meant as a criticism. The
specific context of XOT, where there are multiple examples of pages that
work by adding elements to the page's structure in the project tree e.g.
adding a question to a quiz; adding an option to a question; adding a
hotspot in the Hotspot Image page; creates for the user a model of how
things work. Intuition then expects other pages to work in a similar way.
It comes as a surprise then when a page that clearly is about adding
hotspots offers no feature in the wizard to add a hotspot (it's all done by
editing the drawing). This does not make the page a bad, poor or
inappropriate page. It's a damn good page. It is also easy to use, but only
after you understand how it works.

The "display text" child is simplicity itself. It is entirely consistent
with other Xerte pages in that it is presented in the wizard as a child
item and added just like any other child item. The problem appears to be
that for Julian it just did not make any sense - "I had no idea what to do
with it". Many other pages have a new language check box in the wizard. No
one has had a problem yet with them, probably because they haven't noticed
it or have ignored it. But it is just another way of dealing with the same
issue.

"Display text" is the term I have used, as it made the most sense to me,
for all the text contained in a page that does not need to change across
multiple instances of that page type. It is the label on a button, the
phrase "question 1 of 8" etc. All this text used to reside in the code of
the model file. But to enable XOT to be translated into different languages
it had to come out of the model file. It could have been hidden inside the
xwd file with no option to edit it, but at the time of the discussions
around how internationalisation would be handled Inge raised the idea that
the ability to edit it could be useful. You could change it to suit your
audience or to introduce a bit of variety. One quiz page might say "Well
done you have completed the quiz", whilst the next might say "Good job!"
for example.

So the current situation is that many of the original XOT pages have some
"display text". For most pages it is hidden in the top level form under the
language check box. What concerned me about this approach was if there was
a lot of display text. Since the display text will not be changed by most
authors I wanted to keep it separate, rather than to make the top level
form excessively long. For me it was a logical separation of different
types of data.

With the existing pages the display text presented a problem of backward
compatibility with pre-existing XOT projects. The ultimate example of this
is the Quiz page. To ensure that the new model would work with existing
page data I had to keep a default set of display text values in the model
as existing pages would not be able to automatically collect the new
display text data from the xwd file. To ensure that authors in languages
other than English did not see English values in their page I had to add
the display text values to the "new nodes" definition for the page. To make
the display text editable in the xwd form without cluttering up the page's
main form, I added a "display text" child.

Since all the new pages - the Connector pages and the Inventory page will
have no issues of legacy pages in existing projects I kept things simple
and just added the child element "Display text".

So what do we do about display text?

We could

   1. Remove the "display text" child elements and put the display text
   fields in the top level form flagged as "language" - people still won't
   know what to do with it, but they will probably miss seeing it anyway.
   2. Keep the "display text" child but add a hidden copy of the same data
   in the page's new nodes entry, so that the page works without adding the
   "display text" child.
   3. Leave things as they are and let people know in the new release that
   they now have access to the text that used to be built into the model
   files, if they want to change it, but otherwise they can leave it as it is.
   It is a feature of the new release.

You know my preference as it is already implemented. For me the issue of
"display text" is an example of a wider issue. There will be times when the
purpose or usage of a feature of a page, or even the whole page, will not
intuitive to some users. There is a way of adding a pdf file to a project,
resulting in a help button displaying on the main navigation. If you had a
new folder e.g. pageDocs, that operated like the "thumbs" folder, you could
add a pdf file for a page that explained the purpose of the page, the
various elements and the fields in those elements to the user. One entry in
the xwd file could identify the form, in the same way that the thumbs file
is identified.

Different people have different understandings of how things are, leading
to different intuitions as to how something should operate. By being able
to provide an explanation of how a page works we can keep people on board
even when the XOT reality is an imperfect match for their expectations. It
also opens up the opportunity to make more complex pages FWS.

Kind regards

Johnathan

On 25 April 2012 17:38, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>wrote:

> OK, I think I'm being persuaded.
>
> We need to arrive at a consensus around the new stuff. Maybe 'advanced' is
> a better section name for the connectors than 'connectors', or maybe it's
> just a case of think about automating some of the stuff that is correctly
> configured by the form. The 'displaytext' child really confused me: I had
> no idea what to do with it, and I know that for some people, that will be
> very off putting, so it's remembering the FWS mantra, and trying to apply
> the predictable consistent usability stuff to make it as simple and
> straightforward as possible. Documentation and examples will be useful as
> well.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:
> xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Tom Reijnders
> Sent: 25 April 2012 10:53
> To: For Xerte technical developers
> Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Goal
>
> Yes, I think we did. The only thing missing at the moment, and I am
> working on that is a button in the management.php of XOT to
> add/replace a page in one of the templates.
>
> But, that was NOT the only reason to do this in my opinion. Now all
> the model files are the same whether they are used in XOT or the Xerte
> pagetemplates or as pageWizard, and we can translate them and maintain
> them....
>
> Having done all this, we now have the OPTION (not obligation) to add
> the models Johnathan created to XOT (We don't have to, and a user can
> do that him/herself through the management page.)
>
> Also we still can create an visual clue that some of the pages require
> a better understanding of the whol rpoject than just fill in the blanks.
>
> The users we spoke top so far are  VERY enthousistic by all the
> possibillities they now get from XOT and had to do in Xerte firts.
>
> Also, and that was part of the goal as well, it is now easier for a
> person not in the core team to create models and be able to
> maintain/translate them without redoing all the tedious editing/adding
> them to the general xwd's etc....
>
> Tom
>
>
>
> Citeren Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>:
>
> > Have we achieved the goal we set out to of making it easier to build
> > / manage a collection of models  for an administrator wanting to
> > adding his own models? This was one of Ron's requests: has it been
> > achieved?
> >
> > In other words, with the tools that Tom and Jonathan have built, is
> > it easier for you to create the xwd of your choice, or was it easier
> > when you just had to copy sections of an xwd in a text editor?
> >
> > A serious question.
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