Re: A Few Standard Folders [Re: Structure in $HOME]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 10:13, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Claes Holmerson wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 15:12:53 +0100 (CET)
> > From: Claes Holmerson <claes it-slav net>
> > To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> > Subject: Structure in $HOME
> >
> > (I post this also on kde-devel)
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I posted a mail to freedesktop.org (titled "Structure in $HOME") with
> 
> > https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/xdg-list/2003-January/001015.html
> 
> Your focus seems to be mainly on settings and preferences.
> I would be very interested to see
> $HOME/Documents
> $HOME/Images
> $HOME/Music
> $HOME/Web Pages
> $HOME/Video
> perhaps more ...
> 
> While I dislike the Microsoft naming convention of "My Everything", I
> strongly believe that putting default folders in $HOME helps guide and
> encourage users to organise their files in a certain way (learnability!).
> I believe the Macintosh has some standard folders along the same lines.

I agree with you on this. People are usually better off (just in terms
of time spent vs. time gained, obviously there are other important
metrics) doing some organization, but its hard to "get over the hump"
and actually do it. Interfaces that subtley encourage people to do
things that are helpful to them long term can be very helpful.

These things all raise an (IMO) important issue though... How do we deal
with the l10n issue? One option is to use .directory files to provide
translations just before folder names get displayed to the user (in
Nautilus)... but then you have problems where the location in the
location bar doesn't match the name of the folder you went into. (for
example, you click on "Video Juegos" and end up in
"file:///home/seth/Video Games/").

-Seth