I remember reading about Raskin's work on Ward's wiki, back before Ward and crew made it unusable. I wrote some pretty heated diatribes against it, which I'm not going to do now, but I will push back on one of his dogmas:<p>> Never allow customization: Consistency, though, led Raskin’s perhaps most controversial idea, prompted by the trouble he saw customers have with documentation. “Customizations are software design changes that are not reflected in the documentation,” and as a documentarian, this could not stand. The designer knows best—something that comes through strongest in Apple’s products—and “allowing the user to change the interface design often results in choices that are not optimal, because the user will, usually, not be a knowledgeable interface designer,” said Raskin. “Time spent in learning and operating the personalization features is time mostly wasted from the task at hand.” Better a consistent, well-designed interface than one you could fiddle with forever.<p>This is a meta-dogma, a dogma about being dogmatic about your design. Never allow the user to change your Holy Vision, because Your Beneficent Self, The Designer (Peace Be Upon You), has decreed it shall be such, such it shall always be, yea, unto the ends of the system's profitability, never allowing the user to grow in their knowledge of how to do their tasks, never allowing the user to bring their own domain knowledge to their tasks. There shalt always be an unbridgeable gulf between Designer (<i>insert holy trump here</i>) and user, and the user shall never trammel the Designer's Roarkian Vision. So mote it be, amen.<p>It's High Modernism in software. It's the exaltation of One True Vision above the people who do the work and might, therefore, know something about how the work is done. It is, in other words, utterly shocking Jobs rejected the Canon Cat and its immense hubris. Probably because it wasn't Jobs' immense hubris.