On 6/2/07, Jon A. Cruz <jon@...204...> wrote:
On Jun 2, 2007, at 9:09 AM, john cliff wrote:
at the end of the day, of all the art sites I've come across, not one
of them uses a mailing list as an interface, I know every time we have
this discussion y'all bring up the POVray site, but to my eyes its
rather like how I found POVray itself, technically capable of doing
the job but not exactly user friendly or pretty. But you miss the main point.
Although you don't happen to find the interface particularly pretty, it is far more than sufficient and has allowed an artistic community to flourish. The functionality of most forums is there, and people didn't need to make it prettier once they hit the sufficient level where artistic discussion and use hit critical mass.
I think your missing the point too. Its a pretty safe bet that the cross section of people using POVray is probably quite different than those using inkscape. We have had over a quarter of a million downloads of the 0.45.1 windows exe from sourceforge now, a large percentage of those probably arent all that technical, are used to forums for interacting on this sort of thing, and wouldnt know what a wiki was. (they'd probably say isnt that the encylopedia thingy?)
Consider a website with dancing flash animation all over.
I'm not suggesting we have something with dancing flash animations, I'm suggesting we dont have something thats butt ugly, and has mail headers between every post. its an artistic community, how about some sense of style and design?
Pretty when you first see it, but once you try to navigate and all your browser controls are nonfunctional and your typing and cursor are heavily lagged from 100% CPU load, functional simplicity starts to show a bit more promising. (And, yes, I've hit that problem with forums I've checked out now and then)
You can make the same sort of arguements about mailing lists if you want to play devils advocate. They take forever to download when someone posts big attachments that your not interested in seeing, and you end up waiting for ages and wasting bandwidth.... Theres bad examples of everything out there if you look hard enough.