Thread: [Xsltforms-support] F1 message box and double click in svn r470

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It would be nice if you'd offer a different way for us to give AgenceXML 
credit.
It's fairly intrusive for a library to take over double click and F1.

Leigh.

Le 21/12/2010 23:37, Leigh L Klotz Jr a écrit :
> It would be nice if you'd offer a different way for us to give AgenceXML
> credit.
> It's fairly intrusive for a library to take over double click and F1.
>
Double click is not mentioned in XForms specifications but was probably 
too intrusive because it might happen accidentally so I changed it to F1 
instead.

Browsers already intercept F1 for their own help/credits and some 
analysis I fund said that it usually was involuntary. The other function 
keys seem more useful and Opera is defining all of them!

What else? A splash box wouldn't be nice, of course... Neither a static 
line at the end of each page...

BTW, this message box shouldn't only display credits but also specific 
debug statistics such as:

    * size of instances
    * Javascript loading time
    * cumulative refresh time
    * longest XPath expression evaluation times

XSLTForms has an LGPL license and I'm sure just few developers will 
hesitate to comment the corresponding Javascript instruction or change 
the interception again if they need to. Beginners probably won't change 
anything but won't press F1 either unless they're looking for help/credits!

Donations for XSLTForms are inexistent and, except in Steven Pemberton's 
and Kurt Cagle's papers and in your own personal site, I never see any 
publicity or credits for it. If XSLTForms is just used for prototyping, 
F1 shouldn't be a problem at all.

Do you have another suggestion?

Thanks!

-Alain

Hi Alain,

Le 22/12/2010 07:31, COUTHURES Alain a écrit :
> XSLTForms has an LGPL license and I'm sure just few developers will
> hesitate to comment the corresponding Javascript instruction or change
> the interception again if they need to. Beginners probably won't
> change anything but won't press F1 either unless they're looking for
> help/credits!
>
> Donations for XSLTForms are inexistent and, except in Steven
> Pemberton's and Kurt Cagle's papers and in your own personal site, I
> never see any publicity or credits for it. If XSLTForms is just used
> for prototyping, F1 shouldn't be a problem at all.
>
> Do you have another suggestion?
>

In the generated HTML+JS, you could add an HTML comment saying that this
was generated with XSLTForms. Most developers look at the source when
they see something impressive. This is the only non-intrusive thing I
can think of at the moment. As I said previously, I will make a
«Credits» page on my website, giving links back to the libraries I use.
Why don't you add a paragraph on this at
http://www.agencexml.com/xsltforms ? Something like «If you use
XSLTForms please give a link to this page and support the project
financially». If you don't ask, most people will think that you don't
need anything.

While I'm at it : I would like to give money regularly to the project,
as this is my belief that when people work, they deserve money. I know
that the 20$ I gave the 20th of May were only symbolic, but living on
the Assedics isn't a "golden" situation, and I'm 100% sure that I cannot
pay for your support service.

FYI, my plan is that when my real estate website will be good enough,
the website will attract some paying visitors and I will be able to give
back to Open-Source projects a part of this money. XSLTForms is the most
important library in my project, but ATM it's really slow to refresh all
models when you have many. If you want to make XSLTForms famous (and
more easily earn money from it), you should focus on the issues of
Full-AJAX-websites building. As you know, refreshing a single model is
impossible and that means that web-apps need to be build very cleverly
in order to "factorize" refreshes (I mean that I need to use flags in my
JS code to ensure that there will only be one refresh done after a serie
of actions --- and this sole refresh is already slow as I need to
refresh all models).

XSLTForms could be a «Rapid declarative AJAX-like application
development library», the only of its kind, but it's not there yet. I
would like to contribute patches to the code but it lacks comments and
it's sometimes really cryptic (this wrong-order insertion of nodes in
"XFInsert.prototype.run" just kills me). So there's really not many
options left to me. I just sent you another 20$ to show that I
appreciate the time you spend on XSLTForms. It's symbolic but what else
can I do?

Best regards,
Grégoire

On 12/21/2010 10:31 PM, COUTHURES Alain wrote:
> Le 21/12/2010 23:37, Leigh L Klotz Jr a écrit :
>> It would be nice if you'd offer a different way for us to give AgenceXML
>> credit.
>> It's fairly intrusive for a library to take over double click and F1.
>>
> Double click is not mentioned in XForms specifications but was 
> probably too intrusive because it might happen accidentally so I 
> changed it to F1 instead.
>
> Browsers already intercept F1 for their own help/credits and some 
> analysis I fund said that it usually was involuntary. The other 
> function keys seem more useful and Opera is defining all of them!
>
> What else? A splash box wouldn't be nice, of course... Neither a 
> static line at the end of each page...
>
> BTW, this message box shouldn't only display credits but also specific 
> debug statistics such as:
>
>     * size of instances
>     * Javascript loading time
>     * cumulative refresh time
>     * longest XPath expression evaluation times
>
> XSLTForms has an LGPL license and I'm sure just few developers will 
> hesitate to comment the corresponding Javascript instruction or change 
> the interception again if they need to. Beginners probably won't 
> change anything but won't press F1 either unless they're looking for 
> help/credits!
>
> Donations for XSLTForms are inexistent and, except in Steven 
> Pemberton's and Kurt Cagle's papers and in your own personal site, I 
> never see any publicity or credits for it. If XSLTForms is just used 
> for prototyping, F1 shouldn't be a problem at all.
>
> Do you have another suggestion?
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Alain

Yes, I have a few suggestions:

1. As Gregoire said, output the "powered by" info in a comment.
2. Enable F1 only when Debug is on.
3. We can't and won't make donations.  However, we've paid for support, 
and I know others have as well.  We're happy to pay for support.  I 
suspect if you put an option on your page for a support agreement, you'd 
attract more.
4. As for more intrusive stuff, it's my opinion that one of the reasons 
that FormsPlayer wasn't more widely adopted is that it put big icons 
with "powered by FormsPlayer" next to each form control.  Those too had 
debug info in them, and if you bought a paid copy you could remove them, 
but I believe their presence caused many to simply abandon interest long 
before that point came.

Leigh.

Thread: [Xsltforms-support] F1 message box and double click in svn r470

xsltforms-support