Re: [PATCH] gitweb: tree view: eliminate redundant "blob"

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Oct 3, 2006, 04:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7v1wpqujck.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <200610022203.44733.jnareb@gmail.com>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Luben Tuikov wrote:
>> --- Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think that redundancy in a visual interface (and not only visual, as 
>>> seen in the example of Perl programming language) is a good idea, 
>>> contrary to the redundancy in code or data (database).
>> 
>> Jakub,
>> 
>> Your opinion here is highly subjective.
>
> Yours too.
>  
>> Years of experience make certain things "make sense" and other
>> "make less sense".  Note that that is in itself subjective.
>> 
>> Give it 10 years, your opinion will change.
>
> Perhaps. Perhaps not.
>
> I guess we have to agree to disagree. It's Junio opinion that
> matters (which patches would get accepted).

Honestly, I _hate_ to be in the position to decide in which color the bikeshed should be, but sometimes that is what a maintainer has to do.

I personally feel that in a list that is one line per item, like the shortlog, we do not necessarily have to underline the log message even though they are clickable. The purpose of the list is to show things so people can read them. Readability matters. At the same time we would want to give access to object details; I think it is Ok not to give underline to them, as long as people can easily pick up the convention that each of these listed items is clickable to obtain details about it. We should probably make other clickable links at the right, such as "tree" and "snapshot", visually stand out, by giving underline as we already do. They are not really "text", but clickable icons that happen to be done with text (as opposed to being done with img).

By the same logic, the purpose of the tree view is to show contents of a tree object. If the user picks up the convention for the short log that each listed commit can be clicked to obtain details about it, it probably is natural for the user to expect that each listed entry in the tree view can be clicked to obtain details about it, so not showing the redundant tree/blob link is in line with that. And it would be consistent not to give underline to the file or directory names.

By the way, you are right in saying if we were to do icons they should be out-of-line img with help for text browsers. That patch was done as illustration not as a serious patch (I am not a serious gitweb hacker, so anything I do with gitweb, unless it is an obvious and trivial bugfix, is not meant for direct inclusion).