Re: Enter the build sheriff: Jacob.

[Mario Vukelic <mario vukelic chello at>]

On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 18:27, Alan Cox wrote: 

> Broken is still broken. When was the last time you read in a newspaper 
> about someone being asked a no/yes question ?
> 
> Let me quote google 
> 
> 	yes/no	2.3 million hits	(a lot are yes,no,no things
> 	no/yes	640,000 hits		 on both of these due to google)
> 
> 	"yes or no"	441,000
> 	"no or yes"	4870
> 
> Begin to get the picture ?
> 
> 441,000 web page authors know the right ordering. 
Ha! But! 

I'm no UI expert, but I have done a lot of presentation design for a
living (yes, it sucks) 

yes/no in a _text_ means that your eyes and mind are going to stop on
"yes", because you are _reading_ along a given, subconsciously defined, 
route (line for line, left to right, top to bottom, as customary in
western cultures). You don't scan the whole page all the time (you do
scan around the the actual focus point, a few words and lines back and
forth, but this is not important for the current discussion) 

OTOH, when a window (or a new presentation slide) pops up under your
eyes (i.e., without you having control) you react differently: Before
you actually start reading the content, you subconsciously scan the
whole page from top left to bottom right, and your resting point will be
/the object farthest to the right and farthest to the bottom in this
page that you subconsciously attach meaning to/. See here for what I
mean http://members.chello.at/mvukelic/slide_scan.png (small). 

You can try this easily: Let someone create 2 slides in openoffice or
something, without you knowing the content. The first slide can have
arbitrary content. The 2nd slide should have some arbitrary content plus
1 object in the lower left corner and 1 object in the lower right
corner. Best is to use black background, so you don't see the border of
the beamer area (beaming works best, since you get the biggest
distances). Then beam the 1st one, read it. Then let someone advance to
the next slide. Try to notice what your eyes are doing (you can also
have another person watch your eyes) 

Because of this, on a presentation slide you always put the important
stuff in the right lower corner. The lower left gets subconsciously
ignored. You never put unimportant content or objects without content
(e.g., big slide numbers) in the lower right corner 

Given this, I would argue that your example of yes/no in text is exactly
the same thing as the new button order in dialogs: The item you are
going to rest on is "yes". The old order you advocate has it backwards
when compared with your text example. 

Of course, consistency is valuable and until all apps are ported to
Gnome 2 we are inconsistent. But after struggling a bit with the new
order, I am now (after only 2 days of real Gnome 2 usage) convinced that
it is the right way to go.  After all, Gnome 1.x will really be seen as
only a prototype in a few years, and we don't want to be known for
dragging dysfunctional stuff through the versions like this well-known
software company 
-- 

I did not vote for the Austrian government