Re: Prescriptive design rules

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:46d6129b$0$4056$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net...
> Evan Keel wrote:
>
> > This is a post from comp.databases.mysql:
> >
> > <<let's say I want to ask a survey question, with checkboxes:
> >
> > What animals do you like?
> > [] giraffe
> > [] elephant
> > [] donkey
> > ...
> >
> > I'd possibly create a single column named "like" and store each
> > response as a comma delimited string:
> > giraffe,donkey
> > elephant,donkey
> > etc
> >
> >
> > But further, let's say I have a question with checkboxes and also
> > radio buttons:
> >
> > Please select which animals you own, and tell us how much you like
> > each:
> >
> > [] cat () low () medium () high
> > [] dog () low () medium () high
> > [] rat () low () medium () high
> > ...
> >
> > What's the best table design to store that? E.g., I could have a
> > column named "own" and another column named "rate". Or I could have a
> > column named "cat" which might contain:
> > yes,low
> >
> > and another column named "dog" which might contain:
> > no
> >
> > and another column named "rat" which might contain:
> > yes,high
> >
> > etc. But neither of those seems quite right to me.
> >
> > I'm obviously thinking of using one flat table for the whole survey,
> > is that a very wrong thing to do? I'm assuming that using a flat table
> > will naturally make it easier to export in spreadsheet format. I'm
> > also not concerned about the memory usage of a flat file.>>
> >
> > If you could provide 10 prescriptive design rules to a front-end
developer,
> > what would they be? Or just 5?
>
> 1. Learn the fundamentals
> 2. See 1
> 3. See 1
> 4. See 1
> 5. See 1

What are the fundamentals? Can you list 5 basic rules of thumb? Heuristics?

Evan Received on Thu Aug 30 2007 - 04:10:45 CEST