Inlay: Paving the cowpaths

Freeway
1

I’m making a breaking change to Inlay at the moment. I’ve been very cautious about these sorts of things in past, because I wanted Inlay to be the simplest, least-possible-thing-that-could-work, rather than a heavy solution that imposes a bunch of structure on you.

But I noticed something while working out the in-browser interface for editing templated pages: everyone has to manually set the page title and the meta keywords and description as editable, for each template, and that means that it probably won’t get done, even though it’s basic core functionality that every dynamic page should have.

So from now on, the title, description, and keywords will always be editable without any manual intervention on your part. If you don’t want these to be different from page to page (non-optimal behavior on your part, but hey, your choice) then you can edit them to be empty (the tag won’t be published) or the same as other pages.

The expression “paving the cowpaths” means to watch what your users are doing, and then make the repetitive or required parts of that process easier, so they’ll do them automatically. It’s a good opportunity to look for in any design process.

Walter

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Paving the cowpaths is one of the used expressions in Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers (the other is not to reinvent the wheel).

Walter - don’t be too much concerned here.

I’m pretty sure that an average user is aware on it, while an average #fw-author mostly not. What you could think of is the natural limitation of characters in both metas (or at least a warning such as only 156 chars). These days it might be worse to do more than to do nothing.

And the H1 to page-title relation could be way more important however I am not sure how to solve this most efficient - just to double myself:

… while an average #fw-author mostly not!

Cheers

Thomas

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