Re: ... and now for something completely different: User Friendliness

[Wes Hardaker <wes@hardakers.net>]

>>>>> On Thu, 02 Jan 2003 08:37:20 +0100, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> said:

Lars> Eek.  It's a readability nightmare.

Lars> The same is the case with anything that looks like HTML with embedded
Lars> program statements.  If you write PHP with lots of strings and stuff
Lars> in between, it soon just gets too ugly to be fun.

Lars> So -- any good ideas?  Surely somebody must have come up with a nice
Lars> solution here...

Well, complex stuff is never easy to read.

I have another possibility to throw at you: The net-policy package
(see sourceforge) contains a perl module I wrote (QWizard) that makes
it easy to generate a series of possibly-relating wizard questions and
perform actions based on the results.  I originally wrote it to define
a bunch of linked questions, where the dependency issues are taken
care of for the programmer.  It's only output, currently, is via a web
server but I actually hope to write a Tk and/or cli version/backend in the
next few weeks.

The nice thing about is that you can depend on the answers to
questions to decide what future questions to add to the "ask" chain.

The net-policy web site has a few screenshots, but unless you're
familiar with IPsec & firewalls (which is what the questions currently
show configuration fore) you might get a bit lost.

-- 
"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will
 insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."   -- Terry Pratchett