Re: [Fwd: Re: GUI terminology]

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, eugene o'connor wrote:

> I'm interested in Christian's point below about the documentation
> guidelines serving as UI guidelines - I believe that these guidelines
> should be exactly the same. When we were working on the wordlist, we
> came across several places where the UI was inconsistent with itself. A
> few brief examples:
>
> * Use of both GNOME and Gnome: Choose Programs > Utilities > GNOME
> Character Map. But what appears in the titlebar of the application is
> "Gnome Character Map".
> * Statusbar in gedit, status bar in GTimeTracker and Nautilus.
> * Minimize in Window menu, Iconify in Tasklist applet.
>
> These inconsistencies, although apparently minor, make the work of
> documenting the UI more difficult. The writer must investigate whether
> the terms are actually expressing different concepts. The writer may
> also have to use more complex sentence structures to deal with these
> inconsistencies. This in turn makes the task of translation more
> difficult and time-consuming. The inconsistencies can also confuse and
> distract less experienced users.
>
> It is one of my hopes for the wordlist that it will be used to improve
> the internal consistency of the GNOME UI. Any ideas about how we can
> work towards this?

In places where it is obvious that we need to choose one terminology out
of several options (eg. Minimize vs. Iconify), it sounds reasonable that
we: make a list of the problem spots (like you started above), send them
to gnome-doc-list and gnome-gui-list for discussion for a reasonable but
not excessive amount of time (2 or 3 weeks), and then have the
documentation and ui style guide teams get together and either record the
concensus achieved on the mailing lists or else pick one if no concensus
was reached.

I think the tricky part may be identifying what we need to specify and
what we don't need to specify, as Telsa pointed out.  We want to specify
things where the advantage of having them specified clearly outweighs the
advantage of having flexibility.  I guess for the word list there is a
clear benefit of using consistant terminology for any GNOME terms/concepts
which are discussed in multiple GNOME documents or in multiple places in
the GNOME UI.

As for what to do once the word choices are made and put in the word
list...  I think we should do what we always do:  Maintainers are free to
update their code/docs.  Others are free to make patches and ask
maintainers to approve them.  Anybody is also free to write bug reports
saying they think something is wrong and should be fixed.  As always, the
maintainers have the final say, so the maintainer will wind up deciding
whether to follow the word list or not and whether to fix or discard a
given bug report.

Once the word list is ready for use, it wouldn't hurt to post it on
Gnotices and ask maintainers to consider updating their apps/docs based on
the recommendations in the word list.

Dan