From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2020 01:24:33 -0400 Message-ID: References: <87ft6m9xmy.fsf@posteo.net> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Utf-8 Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:116.202.254.214"; logging-data="35818"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" Cc: abrochard@gmx.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: "Philip K." Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Sun Oct 11 07:27:32 2020 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by ciao.gmane.io with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1kRTtM-0009DV-4e for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 07:27:32 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:38250 helo=lists1p.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1kRTtL-0004pW-7h for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 01:27:31 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:52634) by lists.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1kRTqc-0002bV-Rf for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 01:24:42 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:46944) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1kRTqc-0007OQ-F7; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 01:24:42 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.82) (envelope-from ) id 1kRTqT-00076k-4M; Sun, 11 Oct 2020 01:24:33 -0400 In-Reply-To: <87ft6m9xmy.fsf@posteo.net> (philipk@posteo.net) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.emacs.devel:257342 Archived-At: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > The most obvious reason to me is that user error handling is pretty > > poor. Because there is no JS, we cannot offer front-end validation, that > > means that the backend server is responsible for validating fields > > submitted. If validation does not pass, the page must "reload" for the > > user and it needs to show exactly what went wrong and preserve the user > > input. That's my definition of a site that reloads all the time. > That could be mitigated with a "graceful degradation" approach, since > most people do have javascript activated by default. HTML5 also has a > few attributes that could help, such as pattern or required, depending > on what questions are being asked. It is ok to send some JS code, which is labeled as free such that LibreJS recognizes it, which does nothing except validate the inputs. So that a person who enters valid inputs would see no difference between running the JS code and not running it. > >>> - mysql instead of sqlite, which also implies a mysql instance running > >> > >> SQLite is actually surprisingly resilient, according to [0]: It would be a mistake to put the input into any sort of database program. That would only make things difficult and increase the special knowledge people would need in order to work on this. Here's the simple and clean way to do it. Each time a user responds, convert all the answers into a formulaic piece text which states the questions and answers. Email that to a certain address, which will accumulate these messages in one inbox file. Then it will be simple to do all sorts of counting or analysis on that file. Database programs are useful when there are hundreds of thousands of records and you need to search for any one of them. Or when the data are being altered. We will not have so many answers, and each one will never change once sent. -- Dr Richard Stallman Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)