launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/9/22 Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 5:58 AM, Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> So basically what you're saying is that you predict that hand crafting
>> a title for each and every view in Launchpad will end up being less
>> work than a few more iterations on improving the generic page title
>> solution?
>>
>
> Yup, that is exactly what I am saying.
>
> Note, that I think reverse breadcrumbs for page titles is generally a
> bad idea for a number of reasons, which I've tried to outline, but
> *one* of these reasons is that hand crafting does indeed seem
> easier/quicker to me in this case.  Shouldn't we be most of the way
> there already with page_title and the 3.0 UI update?

My assumption is that if we choose hand-crafting we will need to:
1. Come up with a pretty specific directions for how to write good
titles and a strict set on rules on evaluating them.
2. Evaluate (and if necessary, rewrite) every page title.
3. Write new titles for new pages later on (though the cost of that is
marginal).

I'm not sure I'm convinced that this is less work, but I guess that's
just a case where it's not so obvious. I think that for the long term
having to do the work manually will be more effort and quality can
fall dramatically once you transition from a one-off project to
ongoing development. People really do ignore the page titles, so
either developers and reviewers won't pay much attention to them after
a while, or we'll make it an important part of the review process to
make sure that the page title as good and conforms to some set of
guidelines (which we haven't yet written).