Hello everyone,

(This post is a follow-up to the Gossamer Threads Development post in the Announcements forum. If you have not already done so, please read that post first.)

To ensure that the development process of Gossamer Threads products meets your specific needs as much as possible, we encourage you - our users, clients, and customers - to respond to the following short survey regarding the direction the Gossamer Threads product development team should take for future product development. Feel free to be as brief or verbose as you like in responding.

1. What do you think of the XHTML+CSS design described in the announcement? Do you think this is a good or poor move, and do you have any suggestions, alternatives, or other ideas that we might consider?


2. How important is backwards compatibility with older browsers to you? When we say compatibility, we are talking about extremely old browser versions - that is, Netscape 4 and IE 4 - which already are incapable of displaying much of what is on the internet successfully.


3. Are you generally opposed to or in favour of using javascript to add functionality? Up to now, we've taken the policy of using javascript to augment existing capabilities or provide convenience features, with some notable exceptions such as the advanced editor in Gossamer Forum and Gossamer Mail. In the new versions however, we are planning some features that absolutely require javascript in order to work rather than to simply augment existing capabilities.
   
   To give a specific example, one of the features we have already added in the v3 development code is a javascript-based spellcheck feature allowing you to correct your spelling by clicking on misspelled words, then clicking on a correction to replace it with. In this case, how acceptable would you consider having the spellcheck support only available to users with javascript enabled in their browsers? We will never make core features (e.g. sending e-mail, reading posts, adding links, etc.) require javascript, but making secondary features such as this that rely on javascript support makes it much easier for us to quickly add features, and often allows those features to work better for the end-user.
   
   Not having to support both javascript and non-javascript versions will free up time otherwise spent coding and maintaining both versions which will allow us to spend more of it working on new features for our programs. Additionally, it will keep the templates and the code cleaner without extra 'duplicate' code.


4. What suggestions do you have, if any, for the product manuals? Do you find the current format (PDF) useful, or would you consider that we make the manual available in another format, such as MS Word (.doc) or perhaps even broken down into multiple HTML pages?


5. Have you had any problems with the installation of our products? How can we improve the installation process? Would an installation tutorial be useful?


6. We're considering adding a "tutorials" section to the product pages of our website to cover various common tasks associated with administering our products comprising items such as installation (question 5), a Getting Started Guide (e.g. for Gossamer Forum, how to create a Category and Forum), making simple template modifications, etc. Do you feel this addition would be useful, and if so, are there any specific areas in addition to the above that you would like to see?


7. Are there any specific weak spots in our programs currently that you would like to see addressed, with respect to how the overall programs work? We do not refer here to individual product feature requests for this question - but rather areas that affect all of our programs, such as installing, modifying templates, upgrading, etc.

Any other comments and suggestions you care to offer regarding the v3 development would be greatly appreciated. We obviously can't make any promises to include every feature/suggestion, but we will seriously consider and try to respond to each one in a timely fashion.

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Gossamer Threads Development Team