How is a question asking about development methodologies off topic?

Question

I am talking about a question I asked recently.

What is the proper way to create a cross-fade effect?

Moderator Yannis is repeatedly claiming it to off topic question. I want to know what exactly is off topic. Pointing out the entry in FAQ

If you have a question about...

• algorithm and data structure concepts
• design patterns
• developer testing
• development methodologies
• freelancing and business concerns
• quality assurance
• software architecture
• software engineering
• software licensing

I think the question I asked is asking for a better development methodology on creating cross fade effects. Out of the options I mentioned I was hoping for answers other techniques that can create same effect.

Also quoting another FAQ entry

To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …

• every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
• your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
• there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”
• we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?” * it is a rant disguised as a question:
• “______ sucks, am I right?”

Closest among those points is there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.” where I think most of members will point out. But if question like:

• What technical details should a programmer of a web application consider before making the site public?
• I don't program in my spare time. Does that make me a bad developer?
• Should you keep a copy of all the code you write?

is on-topic so is mine.

It was not about any problem I encountered while developing them. If a programmer has previously built such system themselves, it could be easily answered. Like in a comment throsten has mention using canvas element. That is probable alternative for creating that effect.

Answer 1

I don't know why people are giving you grief over whether or not your question is about development methodologies, or whether a perfect solution exists, as if either are reasons alone to close your question. While it's true there is a technical definition to "development methodology", using it in a colloquial sense to mean "a high-level method to handle a programming problem" is still on-topic and exactly what Programmers is for.

To me, it's pretty clear that's what your question is looking for—high-level design advice—and it's definitely a practical problem someone would actually face. So in that sense, What kind of questions should I not ask here? section of the FAQ doesn't apply.

However, your question is lacking one crucial thing, which thorsten müller tried to draw out:

Why exactly do you want to disregard those solutions? They work reasonably well for most needs. Most other solutions would need to directly access the pixel data (after putting the image in a canvas element), which would be slow and a lot of work to implement. (That at least if it needs to be done within a web site)

Or, to put it another way, your question doesn't address what you've tried. If you expand your question to explain why the solutions you've found so far are not sufficient, and—even better—go into what you've tried yourself (and where you came up short), your question would be perfectly fine and I'd vote to reopen it.

Answer 2

The "development methodologies" mentioned in the FAQ specifically refers to the Software Development Methodologies used in the industry, which is not what this question was about.

As @YannisRizos stated in a comment:

What's the actual practical problem you are trying to solve? If you are looking for "the best" algorithm/technique, that doesn't exist, that's not how programming works, programming is all about tradeoffs. Decide what you're building first, then tell us exactly why the solutions you found don't work for what you are building, and then we might have a good question on our hands..

As it stands, the question doesn't have a "real answer" that can be attributed to it. It is hard to answer the question in its current form as we're not sure what problem you're actually trying to solve - all the information we have is that you don't want to use the two techniques you have already outlined.

Answer 3

You appear to think that your question is about algorithms and/or development methodologies. Let's take care of the obvious first, a development methodology is:

A software development methodology or system development methodology in software engineering is a framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process of developing an information system.

Questions about development methodologies are expected to be about topics like, for example, prototyping, incremental development, agile methodologies, etc. Although as Mark notes there's a colloquial sense to development methodology, since Programmers is a site for professional developments, let's go with with the formal definition instead.

As for the algorithms part, although there isn't a formal and strict definition of what an algorithm is, this one is good enough:

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (originating from al-Khwārizmī, the famous Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī) is a step-by-step procedure for calculations. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning.

The fact that you say you'd love to see an answer as an algorithm, doesn't make it a question about algorithms.

The original version of the question was also not constructive:

What kind of questions should I not ask here?

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)

To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …

• every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
• your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: - “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
• there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”
• we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”
• it is a rant disguised as a question: “______ sucks, am I right?”

Looking for "the best", without clearly defining what that means for you leads to equally valid answers (and when that happens, the more popular answer wins, but popular doesn't necessarily mean useful - for example: Bieber). You were providing two valid answers in your question and expected more answers, without clearly telling us why the two methods you've already found didn't work. And, as you've mentioned in the comments, this was more of a curiosity question than a question about an actual & practical problem. All of the above, made it extremely open ended.

However, in the current version of the question you are telling us why the two solutions don't work for you, and you've further defined the problem. You are not simply looking for the incredibly vague "best" and by giving us detailed explanations of why the two methods don't work for you, you've stopped people from proposing other methods that have the same problems, making the question quite less open ended.

I am still not convinced that your question qualifies as a high level design problem, however since you fixed the more important problems, who cares what I think? Can't promise it won't get closed again, but even if not convinced I'm willing to err in the side of re-opening this one, just for the effort alone.

Lastly please don't try to argue for your question by pointing to other questions, the best that can come of it is that the other questions will be closed as well (if they are indeed similar to your own). Instead focus on arguing for your question on its own merits.