Thinking about a dive site "schema"

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 09:17:00PM +0100, Henrik Brautaset Aronsen wrote:
> 
> The thing to note here is that it works for *you*.  And that's great!
> But I believe that we should provide a user interface that doesn't
> restrict our users.

Oh wow. I'd say that went really well.

To sum up (and to try to match the level of discourse by including some
references to excrement)...

I see no problem at all having our local representation of dive sites deal
with sites like

Name: "Mama's lake"
Description: "Remember that dad flushes the septic system into the lake
every Sunday, so poop everywhere until about Wednesday."

And no GPS information. You will never want to push this into one of the
dive site websites. And you know where Mama's lake is, so no need to have
GPS location.

It does break one of the desired aspects of the UI (which was going to be
map based), but that's something we can work around, I'm sure.

Auto completion of location would still work.

Switching to the dive site view would still work and show you the rather
critically important information in the description.

You just couldn't visualize this on a map. Boo-ho. You get what you asked
for, a dive site without a location. But if that's what you want? Awesome.
And if that's not what you want, then add GPS data.


I also see no problem with mimiking some of the behavior that Linus so
vehemently dislikes. There can be many ways a user finds the right spot on
the map. Yes, the easiest way is some form of GPS input. From a picture,
from a GPX file, from the Subsurface webservice.
Alternatively the user can drag the map around and zoom until they find
the spot and then double click and have Marble jump somewhere else and
then refuse to return a geo location (or something slightly more
successful).
And it's easy enough to have the user enter "Norway", "Rødberg", "Sentrum"
and have the map go to the right place so they can repeat the same doomed
attempt to set the location.

And it would be equally easy to see if Google can make sense of whatever
weird structure the diver self-imposes. For example, the Google API is
totally happy to get us close to the right spot if the diver enters
"Mama's lake, Sentrum, Rødberg, Norway" as the dive location.
And does equally well for people who think more like "Norway, Rødberg,
Sentrum, Mama's lake".

So while I have no interest in enforcing a structure or schema on people,
I have no issue trying to parse what's there and to use that to give us
some indication on where on a map this might be.

And if all we get is "Mama's lake" or "Turtle reef" with nothing else, we
can always show a picture of the solar system.

/D