launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 6:37 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm pessimistic about the amount of work to hand craft page titles.  We have
> at least 375 templates which translates to at least that many pages.  Look
> how much effort it was just to do mechanical conversions of templates.  It's
> going to be a huge amount of work to first think of a useful title, bikeshed
> on that a bit, make the change, and update the tests.

The problem with looking at it this way is that in fact we don't have
375 pages of equal importance.  Just click around the site and you get
a much more manageable number of pages that could have reasonable
titles crafted for them.  So maybe it is more work to hand craft,
maybe it isn't.  At the least, it's debatable, and certainly, we're
sacrificing usefulness on the important pages for the sake of the work
dealing with the less important pages.

As I said to Barry on a voice call, I don't see why we can't have both
-- a nicely crafted title when it matters and fallback to reverse
breadcrumbs.  I was under the impression that we couldn't have this
for the sake of consistency -- based on the UI meeting notes -- so if
presented with an either/or choice, I think human-readable titles are
preferable.

I suspect, too, that we're only counting the cost of reverse
breadcrumbs in terms of the initial work between the two options and
not considering the ongoing cost of little tweaks to the system, bugs
continually filed when a certain page doesn't work well in the latest
version of the pattern, and general noise about these weird and geeky
page titles. :)

Cheers,
deryck


-- 
Deryck Hodge
https://launchpad.net/~deryck
http://www.devurandom.org/