On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 02:30:48PM -0500, Daniel B. wrote:
> Dave Sherohman wrote:
> >On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 12:36:55PM -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> >I was complaining solely about the use of "compact" to mean "delete".
>
> Are you confusing the logical level (what the user almost always deals
> with) with the physical level?
I would instead say that the Netscape/IceDove/Mozilla/SeaMonkey developers
are forcing the end user to deal with the details of the physical layer
rather than allowing users to exist, as they normally do, in the logical
realm.
Or, to put it another way, users tend to think "I've read my email
messages, so now I'll delete them" rather than "I've read my email
messages, so now I'll make the folder smaller."
> At the logical level, the messages are already deleted (from the folder).
> There is no way to get them back (from thr folder from which they're
> deleted) going through the tool (Seamonkey).
If the tool does not provide a means to undelete messages, then I also
find the decision to not make permanent deletion (either when the user
changes folders or exits the program; it doesn't need to be immediate
for reasons which have been repeatedly discussed in this thread already)
a default action to be questionable at best. If you can't undelete it,
then why keep it around?
> However, yes, copies of the data still exist in the files. And, yes,
> although the user doesn't _usually_ deal with that, the user sometimes
> does, e.g., when you want to make sure the data has been actually
> been deleted.
"Deleted and inaccessible, but still around" does not have a place in most
users' mental model of the world and, even if that state actually does
exist (with good reason) somewhere in the guts of the software, those
details should not be forced upon them. Good user interface designs
generally mirror the users' expectations, not the internal workings of
the software.
> But that's the same as deleting a file: Deleting a file tells the file
> system to forget about remembering the data, but it doesn't usually
> overwrite the data, so it or pieces of it are still on the disk unless
> you perform some other operation to actually remove (overwrite) it.
Not really a very good analogy, as the file system will reuse the disk
space without requiring any additional action ('compact', 'purge',
'expunge', whatever) after the file has been deleted.
> Would "Purge Deleted Messages" work?
Yes, I think it would, since it follows the typical user's mental model
of "get rid of the message(s)". They still might be a little surprised
by it being a two-stage operation (delete, then purge), but at least
"purge" is more obviously related to "delete" than "compact" is.
--
Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things
like "display quality too high"
- Peter Gutmann, "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection"
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
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