On 3/26/2010 4:45 PM, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:

here's the first appearance of my collaborative proofing system:

...

http://z-m-l.com/go/sitka/editr.pl

you are hereby invited to kick the tires on it and give feedback...

i especially invite criticism. constructive criticism is preferred, of course, but if you need to be destructive, do please feel free. i have thick skin. and am fully capable of biting back, if i want.

the interface is displayed in 4 quadrants, 2 on top, 2 on bottom; the top 2 will fill the window initially; scroll down for the others; the top quadrants are for smooth-reading, the bottom editing...

i expect my text to be very clean after aggressive preprocessing, so the emphasis in my system is geared toward smooth-reading.

On my system, my browser window is approx 1050 x 1600. In this case, the page image occupied a little more than two-thirds of the right-hand side of the screen, and the apparent "smooth-reading" text occupied less than 1/3, resulting in a text reading screen that created line breaks in odd and unsettling locations; e.g, the first page read like this: <blockquote> SITKA [not centered or highlighted] [indeterminate amount of whitespace] Foreward [more whitespace] The panorama of sea, island, and moun- tain, which holds Sitka, Alaska, as a jewel in its setting, is one of the most beautiful of those which surround the cities of the world. Toward the sea from the peninsula on which Sitka is situated stretches an expanse of waters, studded with forest-clad etc. </blockquote> It's kind of like reading a PG text. On the bottom half(?) of the page, the edit box (which, by the way, is much easier to read than the "smooth reading" presentation), is set to an absolute width that does not cause the odd word wrapping, but which makes the two boxes have more width than the width of my browser, causing the edit box to appear below, and to the left of the page image. Believe me, I understand that getting a pleasing layout when you don't know and can't control the width of a user's browser is a difficult thing. Above the edit box, but below the page image, there is an apparent edit box containing the hyphenated words "per- fect" and "cen- turies;" (but not the hyphenated word "moun- tain"; to the side there is a button labeled "bulk-add." I do not understand what any of these controls are for. It seems that the edit box is used to make corrections to the text as displayed above. I'm guessing that the "reset" button restores the text to the way it ways at some point in the future, and next move to the next page. Below the edit box there are two sets of radio buttons, one alternating between "b" and "c", and the other between "sho" and "no." I have no idea as to what these two sets of radio buttons accomplishes. Generally, I find little that is intuitive about the interface; however, this is not surprising, as I think there is very little in the world that is truly intuitive. We simply live in a culture that is too diverse for anyone to assume that anyone, let alone a majority of anyones, will understand a UI in the way we intended it. You might want to add some page title and explanatory comments to make it clear that the page consists of two parts, a smooth reading section and an editing section. In order to reduce "noise," you may want to have two separate pages, with a "switch mode" button to switch between "smooth reading" mode and the "edit" mode. I assume that for editing you would like people to use your proprietary s.m.l. markup language. It would probably be a good idea to add a button and associated popup window with a s.m.l. "cheat sheet." (See above comments about intuitiveness.) Hope this helps. Good luck.