Re: Debian Project Leader Elections 2007: Draft ballot
On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 04:11:53PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> redundant information eases parsing of potentially MTA mangled ballots
It eases the parsing of occasional corner cases with some voters, yes, but
if forces *all* voters to read something that is inherently confusing.
> Given that ballots can be word wrapped, can have common leading text,
> might have words that are damaged by MUA's not encoding a non-ascii word
> identically; it makes sense to increase the robustness of the parser by
> giving it a well known, unique prefix.
I don't see how any of that is more important than having a straightforward
text for the voters to read. This is a user interface, it is not a machine
interface; robustness towards the human eyes and minds is more important
than robustness towards code parsers IMO.
Word wrapping and leading text is fairly inconsequent so they can be
eliminated (disallowed) without much problem. Non-ASCII options are
possible with e.g. people's names, but if we know for a fact that they
aren't supported by the entire voting environment, they should be avoided.
I should hope that people wouldn't be fussy about it given that we have
already standardized on the English language anyway. (Raphael? :)
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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