One of OpenACS's recurring issues is that it offers several different approaches to doing the same thing. In some anchitectures this is considered a strength, "there's more than one way," but I think that this diversity hurts OpenACS. In practice it has lead to a division of coding, bug fixing, and documentation efforts, as well as a palimpsest of many different coding techniques embedded in the Core packages, so that there is rarely more than one "standard" example of any particular technique. We've made progress merging email, photo album, bugs, and other duplicate packages. I see a big benefit in having a single standard way to do lists that includes sorting, filtering, paginating, bulk operations, and hooks for single-record insert/delete/update/view. Does this proposal take us further away from that?
How can we provide examples in the core packages of correct usage of the technique
Who will write documentation showing developers when to use multirow vs pagination vs list-template?
In the pagination approach, how does one sort, filter, or do bulk operations? Who will add Jon's documentation of his procs to the standard docs?
