Hi Martin,
Here's my proposal: horizontal connections should only be used when the upper object has only one outlet, and the lower object has only one inlet. Otherwise there will be always be ambiguity.
With your example of all outlets pointing to the same inlet, there is still ambiguity as to whether or not all the outlets are actually connected. That's fine if your patching style is to connect them first, and only line them up after. But if someone is debugs a patch they made that includes your abstraction, they would have to spend time moving objects to be certain everything is actually connected.
-Jonathan
--- On Sat, 3/21/09, Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.ca wrote:
From: Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.ca Subject: Re: [PD] style guide idea: [send foo] versus [; foo( To: pd-list@iem.at Date: Saturday, March 21, 2009, 11:42 PM Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Martin Peach hat gesagt: // Martin Peach wrote:
It's a fun exercise for some kinds of mind to
make all the non-vertical lines either horizontal or 45 degrees, as in the attached screen grab.
Ha, yeah, that's really cute!
Unfortunatly I clashes with another personal
preference I have: avoiding
horizontal lines.
My personal preference says horizontal lines are all right as long as the connections are unambiguous. If a line passes across several outlets on the way to somewhere it's only acceptable when all the outlets are connected to the same inlet, so a bunch of messages to the same inlet could all be aligned on the same horizontal or diagonal line, but not vertical because then the message inlets would appear to be connected when they're not.
Martin
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