Subject: Daily Dose version 2 launched

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 15:04:32 +0200

Hi,

Some of you may already be familiar with the "Daily Dose of IETF" 
tool, which has been running since late 2005 (at address
http://people.nokia.net/~pasi/dailydose/)

For those who haven't seen this yet: Daily Dose is a tool that 
shows what's new today in IETF: messages from the IETF Announce 
mailing list, new RFCs and Internet-Drafts, draft progress 
through IETF process, new IPR disclosures, and much more (more 
details can be found at http://tools.ietf.org/dailydose/about.html).

The tool has now undergone a major rewrite and facelift.  The 
biggest changes compared to version 1 are:

- New address http://tools.ietf.org/ -- this should provide 
  more bandwidth and reliability. Big thanks to Henrik for 
  helping with this!
- New graphical layout.
- Hand-written articles and "classified ads" in addition to 
  automatically generated content.

If you have any comments or suggestions, join the tools-discuss
mailing list (https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss),
or contact me directly.

Best regards,
Pasi

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:51:40 -0400

--On Friday, 02 November, 2007 15:04 +0200 [email-masked]
wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Some of you may already be familiar with the "Daily Dose of
> IETF"  tool, which has been running since late 2005 (at address
>...
>...

Pasi,

Having the information on this page available is great.  My
congratulations and thanks to all who are participating.

However, I strongly object to making this the page at
http://tools.ietf.org/, especially without warning and more
general discussion.   The value of that page and URL since it
was created has been to permit quick and efficient access to the
tools collection.  This change pushes the tools lists and links
down behind, or even puts the links in a long list to the left
of, a graphics-laden and textually-rich page.  That page takes a
long time to load over a slow or intermittent link and that is
distracting when one is focused on quickly getting a job done.
That does not, it seems to me, serve those who are trying to
access the tools list and links to get IETF work done, no matter
how much it my be valuable to those who are trying to track work
in the IETF.

     john

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:00:03 -0400

I second John's note.  When I saw Pasi's note, I had assumed that he 
was referring to a link off of the tools page.
Replacing the tools page with an activity summary is quite surprising.
Joel

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:32:22 +0100

Hi Joel,

> Replacing the tools page with an activity summary is quite surprising.

Hmm.  I'm not sure exactly what's the issue here, so let's try to
explore this and see what we can find out.

Essentially, the change is two-fold:  

1. The old lefthand list of links have been replaced by the same lefthand
   list of links which appear on all the WG and other tools pages, making
   for one less list of links to keep up-to-date manually.  This has been
   in the works for quite some time; I've tried to poll people on it, and
   most people seem to be happier with the lefthand menu on the WG pages
   than the front page menu.

2. Replacing the static text on the first page with a news item page.

   The static text that was replaced was as follows:

     -----------------------------------------------------------------------

                        Welcome to the IETF Tools Pages

               These pages are maintained by the IETF Tools Team.

     The aim of these web-pages is to help the IETF community as follows:

     * Make it easy to find existing tools
     * Provide means of feedback on existing and new tools (wiki and mailing
       list)
     * Provide information on new and updated tools

     If you have comments on these pages, or ideas for new tools or for
     refinement of current tools, please send them to [email-masked].

     For current tools, there may also be a page in the IETF tools wiki (in
     addition to the tools page you can reach through the menu to the left)
     which summarises proposals and known deficiencies - feel welcome to
     check this out, and contribute your information!

     -----------------------------------------------------------------------

The way I see it, replacing that with a news summary would be a good
idea.  The text above was appropriate when the tools pages were being
established; they are now used by a lot of people, and the text above
seems to be a bit superfluous.

I could be wrong about that, and if so, an indication of how you
feel about the old and new page would be good.  Some options are:

   - You would specifically like to keep the text above (or some
   modification of it).

   - You agree that it's time for a re-working of the front page, but you
   don't want to have the latest happenings on the front page, you want
   them as a separate news page.

   - You don't care too much what's at the front page, as long as it's
   not too heavy-weight -- the major objection isn't to the news page as
   such, but to the increased size of the page *for you personally as a
   consumer of the page*

   - Some other option which I haven't understood the importance of yet,
   which you will be able to formulate better than I can here :-)

Please speak up and indicate as specifically as you can what's good and
bad about the change, and how we can improve it; and we'll try to make it
so!

Regards,

	Henrik

---

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 19:36:27 +0000

On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:00:03 -0400
"Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> was referring to a link off of the tools page. Replacing the tools
> page with an activity summary is quite surprising. Joel
> 
Indeed.  I suggested that an Atom feed would be a very useful
alternative.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:51:33 -0400

Henrik,

To, as you asked, give a personal preference as clearly as
possible:

(1) I would like the tools page to simply contain the tools
inventory and links, in reasonably large type and grouped
accordingly (rather than the small type and low differentiation
left column that we see today.

(2) I would like to see that page organized so that it loads as
quickly as possible, even over connections that may be very slow
or that one may have time keeping up long enough to load
something complicated.  That means no graphics, no fancy table
layouts, and virtually nothing that is unnecessary to convey the
relevant _tool_ information.  

(3) I can see the news materials put at news.ietf.org (or some
equivalent), linked to from the tools page, as an atom feed (as
Steve Bellovin suggested), or all of the above.   But, when I go
looking for tools, I want to find the tools and the tools
only... with a minimum of fuss.

And, yes, those comments are based on my reaction to the
increased size of the page for me personally as a consumer of
the page.  I don't spend as much time on slow or rotten links as
I did a few years ago, but that situation still isn't unusual
for me.

     john

---

From: Lixia Zhang <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 12:52:51 -0700

Hi Henrik,

here is my 2 cents: every time when I go to tools page is because I'm  
looking for some tools, but not news. Assuming others go there for  
the same purpose, then one main goal is to ease the tool searching,  
right?
instead of daily dose being the front page, what about treating the  
daily dose just as an item (that's a tool in some sense:), and make  
the content of http://tools.ietf.org/tools/ the front page?  for me  
that can be a speedup

Lixia

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:51:33 -0400

Henrik,

     john

---

From: Lixia Zhang <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 12:52:51 -0700

Hi Henrik,

Lixia

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:36:13 -0400

The basic issue for me is that from the tools page I expect to find the tools.
The fact that the tools are buried at http://tools.ietf.org/tools is 
something I could learn.  But that would mean that for all practical 
purposes I would treat that as the tools page.  I actually 
appreciated the tools being listed in the sidebar so I could easily 
see where the tool I needed was.  (So I'm a geek; id-nits is actually 
more meaningful to mean than "Check internet-drafts for submission nits")

The news page really would seem to belong at news.ietf.org.  it does 
seem like a nice page.

For me, the page loading time is not an issue.  But I think that it 
is an issue for enough people that it at least should have been thought about.

Yours,
Joel

---

From: Olafur Gudmundsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:28:49 -0400

I go to the tools site most of the time to look at Internet drafts as
I like the multiple ways I can view the drafts in text, with HTML links,
diffs etc.

I like the new news version of the page as I can see that helps people see
what is happening, I can just as easily live with news.ietf.org for that.

The new daily dose is well integrated into the existing tools so I see this
as an advantage.
My vote is to keep the Daily dose format

         Olafur

At 19:12 02/11/2007, Lixia Zhang wrote:
>>---------------------------------------------------------------------- -
>>
>>---------------------------------------------------------------------- -
>>

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:25:30 -0700

Hi Henrik,

That page is well done and it catches the eye.  However, see comments 
inline. :-)

>explore this and see what we can find out.

[snip]

>seems to be a bit superfluous.

A lot of new people may not be familiar with the tools pages.  The 
"static text" tells them what tools is about.  That may sound obvious 
for the people who are already familiar with it.

>    - You would specifically like to keep the text above (or some

Yes.

>    them as a separate news page.

The Daily Dose is more appropriate for a news page.

>    such, but to the increased size of the page *for you personally as a

I would prefer tools to be lightweight.  Some people are still on slow links.

Regards,
-sm

---

From: Lyndon Nerenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 15:50:12 -0700

Henrik, I am in complete agreement with John Klensin's three main  
points.  For me, though, the increased size of the page isn't the  
problem.  My issue with the new home page is that it is extremely  
dense visually, and therefore it takes me a long time to cognitively  
parse the screen in order to find what I'm looking for.  The "dose"  
frame completely overwhelms the left-hand frame with the tools link  
that I want.

There is also the expectation that visiting 'tools.ietf.org' would  
display the tools list.

I do like what the 'dose' page presents -- it's a very useful addition  
-- but I think it is in the wrong location.  It's my feeling that http://tools.ietf.org/ 
  should display what is currently at http://tools.ietf.org/tools/ and  
the Daily Dose e moved to http://news.ietf.org/.

Of course this can all be worked around with browser bookmarks, but  
for a newcomer visiting tools.ietf.org for the first time, I very much  
fear the current layout will simply drive them away when they don't  
see anything close to what they were expecting to find.

--lyndon

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:02:52 -0700

I'm with John on this one. A site home page shouldn't be a newsfeed.
(yes, I know, I'm an antediluvian.)

minor fact:
today, the tools.ietf.org/ page with news is 101 kbytes.
The tools.ietf.org/tools page with tools is 33 kbytes.
Not counting pictures (I think); neither one is "big" by today's standards, 
but still...

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:02:52 -0700

minor fact:

---

From: Lyndon Nerenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 12:27:55 -0700

On 2007-Nov-3, at 10:02 , Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

> Not counting pictures (I think); neither one is "big" by today's  
> standards, but still...

If I'm accessing those pages via GPRS (I'm on Fido in Canada) I pay  
five cents per kilobyte for data.  So, it costs me $1.65 to load .../ 
tools, and $5.05 to get 'the dose' (based on your size estimates).   
These prices are typical of all the Canadian mobile networks.

And just *try* to access a modern-day web page with graphics turned  
off :-(

--lyndon

---

From: "Eric Burger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 08:50:29 -0800

+1

I would offer the page *does* look really nice.  How do you think people
would react if we made the Daily Dose http://www.ietf.org?

But seriously, I would hesitate putting the Daily Dose at news.ietf.org,
just because so many people are hard-wired for news.* to refer to a NNTP
server.  http://www.ietf.org/news seems like a much more logical place.

And please, please, please restore tools.ietf.org to be a fast loading,
mostly text-oriented page!

Thanks.

--
- Eric 

-----Original Message-----
From: Lyndon Nerenberg [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 6:50 PM
To: Henrik Levkowetz
Cc: IETF discussion list
Subject: Re: Daily Dose version 2 launched

Henrik, I am in complete agreement with John Klensin's three main
points.  For me, though, the increased size of the page isn't the
problem.  My issue with the new home page is that it is extremely dense
visually, and therefore it takes me a long time to cognitively parse the
screen in order to find what I'm looking for.  The "dose"  
frame completely overwhelms the left-hand frame with the tools link that
I want.

I do like what the 'dose' page presents -- it's a very useful addition
-- but I think it is in the wrong location.  It's my feeling that
http://tools.ietf.org/
  should display what is currently at http://tools.ietf.org/tools/ and
the Daily Dose e moved to http://news.ietf.org/.

Of course this can all be worked around with browser bookmarks, but for
a newcomer visiting tools.ietf.org for the first time, I very much fear
the current layout will simply drive them away when they don't see
anything close to what they were expecting to find.

--lyndon

Notice:  This email message, together with any attachments, may contain information  of  BEA Systems,  Inc.,  its subsidiaries  and  affiliated entities,  that may be confidential,  proprietary,  copyrighted  and/or legally privileged, and is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity named in this message. If you are not the intended recipient, and have received this message in error, please immediately return this by email and then delete it.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:02:36 -0600

> server.  http://www.ietf.org/news seems like a much more logical place.

+1 for either, but in fact they are not mutually exclusive.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:37:23 +0100

Thanks to everyone who provided input regarding the front page of
the tools.ietf.org servers.

I've now made the page at http://tools.ietf.org/tools also be the
front page, providing a grouped list of the main tools available
at the servers (and in some case also on other servers).

I expect to tweak this a bit, letting the front page and the tools
summary page diverge a bit, maybe by putting some of the intro
material about the server at the top of the front page, before the
tool summaries.

The new daily dose is now available at http://tools.ietf.org/dailydose
(with a redirect from http://tools.ietf.org/news) and there's also
a new link in the lefthand menubar for the news page.

I've done some other changes to the sidebar, in response to other
comments made in this thread; in particular, the sidebar now has
direct links to some of the most used tools.  If you have comments
on the choice of 'most used tools' (currently idnits, draft diffs,
xml2rfc and the spell checker) I'd be happy to hear them.

I hope this addresses most of the concerns raised.

Best,

	Henrik

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:04:14 +0200

The new page does look VERY nice, thanks Pasi and Henrik!

A couple of observations:

- I'm using RSS (not browser) for accessing the news. For that,
  the left hand side frame that lists WGs seems a bit unnecessary,
  and consumes screen space. Is there a way to make the
  frame not be included in the RSS feed?

- I have trained my eyes to look for draft-wg-foo patterns, and the
  new "title: (draft): new status" format is a bit harder to read for
  that. I don't know how to fix this, though. Perhaps you'd want to
  test with "draft: title: new status" or something like that, just to
  make the draft name more visible and more easily found from the
  same horizontal position on the page.

- I don't really care much about what the main page at tools.ietf.org
  contains, as long as I can get to the necessary information from
  there. 99.9% of my accesses to the tools.ietf.org web site are to
  the WG or draft status pages. The tools that I use are either
  installed on my computer (e.g., xml2rfc) or conveniently
  available from the WG status pages (e.g., idnits). But other
  people may have different usage patterns, YMMV.

Jari

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 14:24:42 +0100

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 03:04:14PM +0200,
 Jari Arkko <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 31 lines which said:

> - I'm using RSS (not browser) for accessing the news.

Shame on you, you should use Atom, the IETF format (RFC 4287) :-)

>   For that, the left hand side frame that lists WGs seems a bit
>   unnecessary, and consumes screen space. Is there a way to make the

I do not understand, there are no frames in the RSS feed (nor in the
Atom one) and RSS has no support for frames anyway.

Actually, the problem I have with both feeds is that they have no
<content>, just the titles (which does not change, except for the
issue number), the date and the link. Not very useful.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 15:30:04 +0200

> issue number), the date and the link. Not very useful.

There were two reasons for this: the first is size (one issue can 
easily be 100 KB, so a feed containing the 20 most recent issues
would be quite large).

The second, and more important, reason is that AFAIK most feed 
readers and aggregators wouldn't be able to render the expanding 
yellowish boxes (which contain ID abstracts and other details) 
anyway, because they rely on CSS and JavaScript.

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 14:33:04 +0100

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 03:30:04PM +0200,
 [email-masked] <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 17 lines which said:

> > <content>,[...]

A typical syndication feed does not serve the entire content, but an
abstract.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 14:23:19 -0000

> The second, and more important, reason is that AFAIK most 
> feed readers and aggregators wouldn't be able to render the 
> expanding yellowish boxes (which contain ID abstracts and 
> other details) anyway, because they rely on CSS and JavaScript.

Since when has anyone considered CSS and JavaScript to be
CONTENT!?!?!?

Generally, RSS and ATOM feeds are produced by software.
Software can do things like parse web pages and separate
the content from the markup and also shorten long content
items to the first 300 characters or so. 

In the real world, this kind of thing is Python 101 in that
beginners who have never before used a scripting language
somehow manage to set up their own RSS and ATOM feeds.

In the real world, web site developers also do something
called "usability testing" which catches all these issues
before the site ever goes live. For example, read this:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

If you would run three or four cycles of these cheap
5-user usability tests, fixing all issues before doing
the next test, then you would not have so much traffic
on the IETF complaining.

--Michael Dillon

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 15:37:41 +0100

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 02:23:19PM -0000,
 [email-masked] <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 33 lines which said:

> Generally, RSS and ATOM feeds are produced by software.  Software
> can do things like parse web pages and separate the content from the
> markup and also shorten long content items to the first 300
> characters or so.

That's Python 101. Python 102 is to create the Web pages *and* the
syndication feeds from the same database of content (wether the
database is in XML, JSON, a RDBMS, etc) :-)

---

From: Hannes Tschofenig <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:54:10 +0100

I am sure both of you can help to improve the existing tools.

I like Pasi's webpage a lot and I don't plan to retrieve any IETF page 
over GPRS.

Ciao
Hannes

---

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 16:55:56 +0200

Hi,

I'm hoping that everyone who's criticizing the volunteers that create  
and maintain our tools is considering to offer their obviously vast  
expertise in Vancouver: http://www3.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/wiki/ 
VancouverSprint

Lars

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 23:07:58 +0200

Stephane,

> Shame on you, you should use Atom, the IETF format (RFC 4287) :-)

Point taken. I switched to the Atom feed.

> issue number), the date and the link. Not very useful.
Apparently my reader (Thunderbird 1.5) does something funny
with the feed; it shows the actual content. I like that, but I have
not looked at the details of what is actually provided in the feed
and what is fetched from the link.

Jari

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 10:26:39 +0200

> somehow manage to set up their own RSS and ATOM feeds.

Seeing the first 300 characters is useful for things like blogs,
because it usually allows you to figure out whether you really 
want to read the whole article or not.

I did not find it useful to see e.g. the first 300 characters 
of the Daily Dose page. I also considered other options (such 
as producing a version without the yellowish detail boxes), 
but did not find them personally useful either.

(In other words: this was done intentionally, not because 
I can't write Python (well, Perl in this case).)

> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

I guess this is talking about real-world web site developers, who
develop sites for others for money. I would indeed expect e.g. the
secretariat to do this kind of testing for services paid from our
meeting fees. But Daily Dose is not one of those services.

(BTW, Daily Dose has been live for almost 2 years now.)

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 10:30:26 +0200

> and what is fetched from the link.

The behavior of Thunderbird depends on whether you select
the "Show the article summary instead of loading the web page"
box when you subscribe to the feed.

If you select this, you see only the summary (which is
empty in the current feeds); if you don't, you get the full page
(however, by default Thunderbird seems to ignore JavaScript
here, so the expanding boxes don't work.)

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 10:41:54 -0000

> but did not find them personally useful either.

If I'm not mistaken, you are the developer, not the set of
end users. In which case your personal preferences are not
relevant. If you can provide a choice of two feeds, one using
RSS and one using ATOM, then why can't you also offer a summary
feed and a full content feed?

> > In the real world, web site developers also do something called 
> > "usability testing" which catches all these issues before the site 
> > ever goes live. For example, read this:
> I guess this is talking about real-world web site developers, 
> who develop sites for others for money. I would indeed expect 
> e.g. the secretariat to do this kind of testing for services 
> paid from our meeting fees. But Daily Dose is not one of 
> those services.

There is a grand old IETF tradition of asking for volunteers and
then randomly picking from that set. I see no reason why a web developer
who wants to put something useful on their resume, would not ask
for volunteers from the audience of this site, and then run a usability
test with them.

--Michael Dillon

P.S. I thought this was part of the site redevelopment using Django
but perhaps I was mistaken.

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:20:29 +0200

Michael,

Please be careful about how you set requirements for
things like Daily Dose, or anything in the tools site,
really. The developers like Pasi are volunteers who
are providing a great service at no cost. They do it
because they themselves wanted to have the service
and because they want to be helpful to the IETF
community.

They value feedback, requirements, suggestions, and
more often than not you find that what you wished
for either has already been done or will be done within
minutes of your request.

However, they are not commercial developers working
for us on a contract, and we have no right to dictate
what they will eventually do or how they want to go
about it. Be nice and respect their opinion; their
opinions are typically very well justified.

In particular:

> relevant.
Their preferences are very relevant, because often they
created these things out of their own needs. They are
very keen on hearing what the users think, but please
do not claim that their preferences are irrelevant.

> If you can provide a choice of two feeds, one using

I would think this is because its non-trivial to make a summary
of N independent events reported in the full page. Do you
show the first N, or try to make each event shorter? In any
case, individual readers are most likely interested in specific
events, so how would Daily Dose know what it can leave out
for me? This is very different from showing just the beginning
of a blog entry, for instance.

> for volunteers from the audience of this site, and then run a usability

Where did resumes come up?

FWIW, I don't think a big volunteer test would have added any
value for a feature like this. And even if it did, do we have a right
to require Pasi to do something like that, given that it would
consume a lot of his time, delay the introduction of the new
version to the entire community, etc?

Finally, as someone else noted, we have a tool development
day coming up -- please join and add the features you need!

> but perhaps I was mistaken.
Yes, you were mistaken. Daily dose is Pasi's news service, which is now
being integrated into to the tools site.

Jari

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 13:22:09 +0200

> end users. In which case your personal preferences are not

They are relevant in the sense that *I* decide what I want 
to spend *my* time on.  I'm open to suggestions and good 
ideas, but what gets implemented isn't decided by the
set of end users.

> RSS and one using ATOM, then why can't you also offer a 
> summary feed and a full content feed?

I might. What would you suggest including in these 
feeds? 

In other words, what to include/omit in the summary feed?
And what should the "full" content feed look like? (How
should the draft abstracts etc. be shown?)

<snip>
> P.S. I thought this was part of the site redevelopment using 
> Django but perhaps I was mistaken.

It is not (and I'm actually using Perl instead of Django).

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:26:45 +0000

> do not claim that their preferences are irrelevant.

I very much agree with Jari on this. Both the old and
new daily doses have been and continue to be very useful.

Stephen.

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:34:04 +0100

> feed and a full content feed?

Is this some kind of DoS attack?

Since all the services and tools on tools.ietf.org are written and
provided for free by volunteers, why don't YOU donate a little bit
of your own time to make things better, rather than trying to
upbraid and berate those of us who DOES something, as if you were
trying to make us feel bad enough that we won't ever contribute a
tool or service again???

<snip>

	Henrik

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 12:02:42 -0000

> Please be careful about how you set requirements for things 
> like Daily Dose, or anything in the tools site, really. The 
> developers like Pasi are volunteers who are providing a great 
> service at no cost.

> Where did resumes come up?

Very often, people who volunteer to do something, don't really
do it for free, but in order to gain useful experience that they
can put on their resume and use to get better (or more interesting)
jobs in the future. Running a usability test along the lines that
Jakob Nielsen has written about, is the kind of thing that would
look good on a web developer's resume.

> value for a feature like this.

I agree, and that is why I provided the URL to an article by someone
who has done experiments and discovered that you get most of the
value by doing a SMALL usability test with 5 users, then fix up
all their issues, and repeat again with 5 more users. When you
get to the point of diminishing returns, stop repeating. If you
consider people's time to be a cost regardless of whether money
changes hands, then you get the maximum cost/benefit ratio by doing
this rather than just flinging it out to the community.

> And even if it did, do we have 
> a right to require Pasi to do something like that, given that 
> it would consume a lot of his time, delay the introduction of 
> the new version to the entire community, etc?

Nope, we would have no right to require that anybody implement
a good idea or follow best practice.

But given the number of messages to the list suggesting changes
and fixes, I thought it was reasonable to point out that there is
a better way, and it is documented here
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html>
and it is not expensive to do either in money terms or in terms
of time spent.

> day coming up -- please join and add the features you need!

If I were able to travel to Vancouver, I would do so.

--Michael Dillon

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:41:37 +0100

> look good on a web developer's resume.

I still haven't seen YOU offering to do anything to help.

> this rather than just flinging it out to the community.

The only cost I as a volunteer developer can reasonably consider is
the cost of my own time and the decision of whether to spend it
on IETF tools at all, or not.

It seems you're saying that if I can't find the time to get together
a usability test panel before I tell people at large about the new
or updated tool I've put together, then I shouldn't bother spending
time doing any tools at all.

Do you really mean that?

> a good idea or follow best practice.

I'd love for you to implement a tool, any tool, for the benefit of
the community.  Preferably embodying a good idea, following best
practice, of course.

> and it is not expensive to do either in money terms or in terms

Let me disagree with you here, and have a different opinion.  The
time spent to get together the test group and run the test would
have been a substantial barrier for me.  If you want to offer your
time in setting up something like this for every major change we do
to the volunteer tools, we'll use it.

<snip>

	Henrik

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 13:06:31 -0000

> I still haven't seen YOU offering to do anything to help.

And I don't see you asking me to help.

> It seems you're saying that if I can't find the time to get 
> together a usability test panel before I tell people at large 
> about the new or updated tool I've put together, then I 
> shouldn't bother spending time doing any tools at all.
> 
> Do you really mean that?

No, that is not what I mean.

Judging from the many responses on this list, you are doing a
mass usability test on the entire user population. I assumed,
quite rightly it seems, that you didn't know about how it was
possible to do usability testing very cheaply and very effectively.
If you are not interested in this, then why make such a fuss?
Just ignore me and forget about it.

Frankly I have no idea what this whole tempest is about and
I don't know why you want to drag this onto the open list.

--Michael Dillon

---

From: "Eric Gray" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 08:06:05 -0600

Just to add to what Pasi has said, tools development is different
from most software development.  People who develop tools usually
are among the user coimmunity - if not the most obvious users.

Who would you go to for good tools if not to the craftsman who is
making them for their own use?

--
Eric Gray
Principal Engineer
Ericsson  

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 6:22 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: RE: Daily Dose version 2 launched
> 
> Michael Dillon wrote:

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:26:55 -0500

> end users. In which case your personal preferences are not

Gotta love this one. Nothing like developers eating their own dog food
and improving things based on their own experience. That is not
relevant? Thank goodness people like Thompson and Ritchie weren't
clued into that line of reasoning.

> I don't know why you want to drag this onto the open list.

It's a real shame that some people can't seem to appreciate the hard
work the tools team has been doing and recognize the real value they
have brought to the IETF organization. They have done much to make the
IETF a more effective organization.

Speaking for many I'm sure, a big thanks to the tools team. Keep up
the good work and ignore those that somehow just don't get it.

Thomas

---

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 09:59:10 -0500

> I don't know why you want to drag this onto the open list.

Because you were the one who kvetched on the open list, perhaps?  :-)

My recommendation to the tools people when they receive whining
complaints or even suggestions is the same as any other open source
developer.  Either, "that's a good idea, I'll have it by <next week>",
or "good idea, it's on my TODO list", or "patches will be gratefully
accepted for review".   :-)

						- Ted

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:17:02 -0600

> and it is not expensive to do either in money terms or in terms

This is a lovely reference.  It touts very small, incremental usability testing.

In the mid-70's, the popular email user agent, MSG, had the "Answer" command. 
  When working on a new user agent for Unix -- it was a predecessor to MH -- I 
decided that that probably wasn't the right word to use for a general audience 
and wanted one that was natural them.  I went up to a few secretaries -- hmmm, 
probably 5... -- and asked them something like "Someone sends you a message. 
You want to send a message back to them.  This means you ____ to them."  Every 
secretary immediately said Reply -- and frankly were a bit irritated, since 
they thought the answer (pun?) was so obvious -- so that was the command name 
I used.

Took about 30 minutes, mostly because I had to walk around to get to the 
secretaries.

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 15:24:33 -0000

> Gotta love this one. Nothing like developers eating their own 
> dog food and improving things based on their own experience. 

I have a long career behind me as a developer and I do eat my
own dogfood. However, I find that submitting my work to user
testing is a rather humbling experience which generally gives me
the opportunity to change that dogfood into haute cuisine.
I didn't say that developers should not eat their dogfood or
that eating their own dogfood is bad in any way. All I did say
was that usability testing is good, can be done easily and
cheaply, and results in making the developers look good.

> > Frankly I have no idea what this whole tempest is about and I don't 
> > know why you want to drag this onto the open list.
> 
> It's a real shame that some people can't seem to appreciate 
> the hard work the tools team has been doing and recognize the 
> real value they have brought to the IETF organization. They 
> have done much to make the IETF a more effective organization.
> 
> Speaking for many I'm sure, a big thanks to the tools team. 
> Keep up the good work and ignore those that somehow just don't get it.

I'll add my thanks to the tools team as well. I'm not saying
that their work is bad in any way. I apologize if my comments
appeared otherwise.

But it sure looks like their work *IS* underappreciated or they
would not have felt the way that they do, apparently due to one
ill-chosen word. I suspect that part of the reason for this 
underapreciation is that they release their work before doing
usability tests and therefore the bulk of the feedback that they
receives is pointing out shortcomings in their work. But maybe
I'm wrong and there is some hidden controversy in the tools team
that I inadvertently stepped into.

I mentioned Python in my message because this page:
<http://www3.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/wiki/VancouverSprint>
led me to think that all tools were being developed in Python.
Apparently, this is not so since I've been informed that some
of the developers are still building tools in PERL.

--Michael Dillon

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 08:03:53 -0800

I like it - thanks. And please continue a practice of "Release early,  
Release often", I'm willing to bet it will work better for this type  
of software than a waterfall mode.

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:12:23 +0100

On 2007-11-07 16:24 [email-masked] said the following:
<snip>

> ill-chosen word.

???

Everyone but you who have posted to this thread have clearly indicated
their appreciation; and in addition to that, people have contributed with
helpful suggestions as to the best way to deploy the new functionality.

The tools team *does* feel appreciated by the community :-)

This will be my last reply to you.  Good day to you, sir.

	Henrik

---

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 10:57:37 -0800

I think we need to be a little careful. Code is Law.

In particular control of the conformance suite for a specification provides much greater power to influence the marketplace than mere control of the specification document.

The reason much of the IETF process is the way it is today is that process was reified as tools.

It needs to be clear where change control lies. 

> From: Stephen Farrell [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 6:27 AM
> To: Jari Arkko
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Putting requirements on volunteer tool 
> developers (Was: Re: Daily Dose version 2 launched)
> 
> 
> 
> Jari Arkko wrote:
> >
> > In particular:
> > 
> end users. 
> >> In which case your personal preferences are not relevant.
> created these 
> > things out of their own needs. They are very keen on 
> hearing what the 
> > users think, but please do not claim that their preferences are 
> > irrelevant.
> 
> I very much agree with Jari on this. Both the old and new 
> daily doses have been and continue to be very useful.
> 
> Stephen.
> 
>