[At-Large] Opera now lets you ditch boring web links and use emojis instead

bzs at theworld.com bzs at theworld.com
Mon Feb 21 23:02:44 UTC 2022


In software design/standards there's long been the philosophy of
"Mechanism, Not Policy".

Which means get the plumbing etc working, don't try to (overly) second
guess what people might do with it. And, in particular, whether it's
useful or valuable based on one's generally very limited, spur of the
moment, off the top of one's head imagination.

Of course nothing is quite that black & white and policy creeps in due
to potential harm, limited resources, adding unjustified complexity
("creeping featurism" aka "feeping creaturism"), etc

But it's not a bad guiding philosophy.

Put another way an objection of "why would anyone ever need that?" is
generally suspicious -- trying to inject policy unnecessarily where
mere mechanism, just make it work, would suffice.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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