Re: Documentation

["Daniel E. Markle" <syntax@ashtech.pa.net>]

On Fri, May 05, 2000 at 05:15:21PM -0400, Jason Pincin wrote:
> > > Dan - how's that documentor you were working on going?
> Still awaiting response...

It's going fine, I just need to get some more documenting done and get it
working on vodka.

> 1) We need a set of general form design rules.  Standards that all forms
> should confrm to.  

Definitely.  This is needed to keep security consistent, in particular.

> 2) A spec for each individual form, detailing it's operation, data it
> expects, etc.

I hate to do this on the crappy forms we have now, but documenting forms for
post-beta would be a good idea.

> Does this sound right?  If so - Dan, can you maybe ellaborate somewhat on
> the problems you've faced as a form developer?  I'm probably not the best

The main problems I faced as a form developer was a really poor infrastructure
for form design and lack of planning as to how forms should have been done.
The forms needed to be mapped out better so each form wasn't an exercise in
re-coding everything, instead of just jumping in and coding away.  Many
functions that should have been put in the backend were instead hacked into
the frontend for no better reason than it wasn't in the backend.  This was the
wrong, and a very time consuming, approach.  Not having the functions
documented was a big problem as well, as every few lines of code I had to go
hunting in functions.php3 to find what I needed.

Really, we are working on addressing nearly all of these issues with the new
design.  But most of these problems are related to the horrible current design
and won't really be fixable until we fix the back end.

-- 
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Daniel E. Markle
syntax@ashtech.net
http://www.ashtech.net/syntax
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