CompuServe Messages

I think perhaps you have misunderstood my statement. I am not against consistency ad standardization, provided it is not an enforced restriction. It does not matter whether that restriction is enforced by the OS or by the company producing the computer or by the wishes of the majority of users. Restrictions are restrictions, and if a standard stifles experimentation and innovation, it cannot be said to be altogether good. I'm afraid I have to disagree with your feeling that a machine is made useful by a standardized user interface. It is made more easily learned by the novice, but can, on the other end of the expertise scale, frustrate and limit the experienced user. What if the musical scale had only one note? What if all music were nothing more than variations in timing of that one note? Would you perhaps think that someone, somewhere, would create more notes to use? With a 'standard' file requester, we don't have 12 choices; we have one. Whether it is the best or not depends entirely on the user's subjective opinion of it. Yes, you can bypass the standard, at the cost of more overhead _in the program_, and I think that would be a bad thing. The reason developers are reinventing the wheel when it comes to file requesters is because there is considerable difference of opinion as to how a file requester should look and act. Providing a fixed, immutable 'system file requester' is not the answer. Do you have any real objections to a file requester that is provided in the system in such a way that it allows an easy method of replacement, and in such a way as to be completely transparent to the calling program?