Re: tasks and scenarios

David S. Cargo (escargo@anubis.network.com)
Mon, 26 Jan 1998 12:54:10 -0600

The reason I thought they were tasks is they specify what is to be done,
not how they are done; there is nothing there about a specific interface,
only about the goals to be accomplished. They seem very much in line
with the tasks defined in our homework.

These are tasks as viewed by a user, not gather, organize, scatter as
viewed by the program.

It's true that the user selects messages and organizes them into a
mailbox (or mailboxes), but that is outside the functions of our project.
The organization our program adds is in indexing by various methods
(author and subject primarily). We are not providing something to
reorganize existing mailboxes; we organize as a step in producing
web pages.

When we have functions for selecting what message goes into what "notebook"
(set of HTML pages), we can certainly have a filter that selects certain
subjects going to "the bit bucket". Until we have filtering, everything
gets turned into HTML pages.

It turns out that a product of the company I work for already has a
type of filtering in it. It's not directly of use, but it does provide
a model of filtering we can use. It's not obvious to me how we could
provide a good interface to it, but that's a subject for a more extensive
discussion.

We still need to agree on the tasks, and then develop the detailed
scenarios (by Wednesday).

dsc