[sword-devel] New filter for red letter words

[Daniel Russell]

Jerry Hastings wrote:

> At 12:32 AM 1/15/2003 -0800, Daniel Russell wrote:
>
>> Number one rule in software:
>>
>> Power to the user is more valuable than any philosophy that he 
>> programmers may artificially impose on the project....
>
>
> This is another way in which users are not all the same, and you need 
> to determine which group of users is your target. Some software with 
> the most power to the user and no apparent philosophies are among the 
> most  hated, hard to learn and hard to use, though sometimes the most 
> powerful. A philosophy can give a program some coherence and make it 
> more intuitive, especially if the user knows that the program was 
> written with that particular philosophy.

Sure. I did not go into these details in my statement, because i assume 
the readers know this. This is not what i was referring to. A coherent 
GUI is very important and generally i think Programmers fail to put 
enough energy into this. Certainly a philosophy is important in 
designing the user interface. I was referring to philosophies that 
regulate features available in programs, not the way in which these 
features are *presented*. And i was referring to artificial 
restrictions, not natural ones like a deadline for release.

>
> As to power over texts, this is something that can get users in 
> trouble and embarrassed. If a module is suppose to contain the text of 
> a work of a certain author. but options and filters in the software 
> produce a derivative text of it, users may quote that derivative text 
> as the words of that author. This can attribute words to an author he 
> never said. It can also make it seem that the author believed 
> something he was opposed to. It makes the user and the software look 
> bad. There is already a problem with other software of people quoting 
> and wrongly crediting the quote to an author instead of the software 
> and its creators. We should be careful not to become part of that 
> problem.
>
> Jerry

I thought that was the point of filters (?). Are not filters something 
that the *user* turns on. Obviously the default presentation after 
installation *must* be the raw unaltered module's text.

If the user set's his Internet Explorer home page to 
www.jerryspringer.com, that does not make Microsoft look bad. Therefore, 
Microsoft put the homepage feature into IE. :P