Meaning(s) of "Desktop" (Was Re: [gnome-cy] Accelerators, HTML)

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 09:42:40AM +0000 or thereabouts, Dafydd Harries wrote:
> I've been sort-of keeping notes on phrases I've been uncertain about,
> which I'll include now since you might want to discuss them in the
> meeting tonight.

This is a brilliant list. I am going to take some of these to
the gnome-i18n list and see whether they are meeting the same
ones and the principles they use when they decide. 

> "Desktop". Currently, "bwrdd gwaith" is getting used. Literally, that's
> something like "work table". It doesn't help that "desktop" is used to
> mean more than one thing: what you can see on the screen, the whole
> Gnome environment, and what'r underneath all your windows. At any rate,
> I don't really like "bwrdd gwaith".

I don't disagree that this probably happens. But It shouldn't be 
meaning all these things in Gnome. 

http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/gnome-glossary-desktop.html
is a very large page, but it does include all the terminology and how
documenters and app authors should be using them. You can ignore things
like "usage" and "tags" in the explanations: that's for how they are
marked up in DocBook. 

desktop

    Definition:

    A windows-based environment for users. The desktop is the sum of 
    all the parts of your working environment. The desktop includes all 
    of your panels and windows, the desktop background, and all of your 
    workspaces and viewports. In a GNOME session, you only have one 
    desktop.

[snip]

    Example:

    To add a workspace to the desktop, use the Root menu.

For "the background", you'd want desktop background ("the part of 
the desktop where there are no interface graphical items, such as 
panels and windows"). 

That is of course how it _should_ be used. If you find it used
in another context in Gnome, please file a bug and cite that
page :) 

Anyway, that definition might help with finding the right word
for it?

(If you are unsure about what any of the references in Gnome
apps mean, that style guide and glossary are handy and generally
up to date.) 

Telsa

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