- “Would that also work as a solution to the problem we see at XYZ?”
- “ABC had a similar solution at XYZ, but it lacked feature X, which this
solution fixes.”
Yo u g e t t h e i d e a : s h o w p e o p l e o t h e r re s o u rc e s t h a t ba c k u p t h e c u r re n t
solution, or point out problems in the proposed solution that need fixing
and build your own.
Yo u c o u l d a l s o l e a ve c o m m e n t s t h a t ve r i f y o r d i s a g re e w i t h o t h e r
comments that have stirred discussion. Being known as someone who
prevents flame-wars or steers them to more productive channels is a good
thing.
Build on the Work of Others
The wonderful thing about Web development these days is that you can
easily build on what other people have done. A lot of hard work gets
released as source code or as Creative Commons content.
Instead of writing your own solutions to solve problems that other people
have nearly solved, extend their work to do the one thing it’s missing on
your terms. Why not extend someone else’s ideas and localize them to your
market? This could entail translating and changing some features
(removing those that don’t apply and adding those that are needed), but
it’s probably worth it. When the Yahoo User Interface Library team created
its fonts.css file, it found 12px Arial to be a great readable baseline for Web
typography. The Yahoo team in Hong Kong found that 12px Chinese glyphs
were too small to read, so they adapted. The YUI team — based in
Sunnyvale, California — would never have encountered this issue