Well, as your report suggests, for UI elements we use mostly the "joint" form. I'd like much more the two-words version, though. I find that much clearer to read and understand -- more descriptive and less looking like a geeky invention. Calling something a "podcast" may make sense since it's a neologism anyway, and even taking the term apart you wouldn't recognize it immediately. I'd even say that writing it together makes one more easily deduce it's some word with a 'special' meaning, and not just a compound; so a trip to Wikipedia is in order. In other words, "podcast"'s semantic meaning is not self-contained in the term. However, a "menu bar" is just that: a set of menu items laid out on a bar line. Why do you need a new word for that? Given that, my spellchecker (which, it tells me, is right written as a single word :-)) is quite reasonably informing me that no such words as "checkbox", "menubar", "statusbar" and "titlebar" exist. Another matter is, there's also "radio button" to consider, which is still a widget of the UI being composed by two words. I personally think it has been given one of the uglier names I can imagine, because it may describe its form (given your Gtk+ theme doesn't change that) but certainly not its use. I took time to interview a dozen-or-so non-techie people, and they didn't recognize this until I explicitly told them what it was. Though I admit they were not native English-speakers, they had some problems with the status bar at first, too. I'd like to see "radio button" really go away, far away, never to turn back. It's way better using the term "option" and that's all; if you need to refer to some of these options, you just call them a "group of options", and you ask the user to "choose one of the following options". If he reads of "choose your sex with the right radio button, selecting Male or Female" he'd panic, but "choose your sex between Male and Female selecting the right option" is enough for anyone to understand. The exact wording of the last sentence can be further improved, of course. Just my 2 €-cents. Matteo PS. Sorry for any mistake, I've learned English attending high school. Il giorno mer, 23/04/2008 alle 12.59 -0500, Shaun McCance ha scritto: > There are a number of -bar and -box terms where there's > disagreement on whether they should be one word or two. > Rather than have separate debates for each term, let's > just take a look at a few all at once. I'm not making > any recommendations at this point. I'm just soliciting > opinions. > > check box (Gnome, Microsoft) > checkbox (Apple) > > menu bar (Apple) > menubar (Gnome) > > status bar (Microsoft) > statusbar (Gnome) > > title bar (Apple, Microsoft) > titlebar (Gnome) > > tool bar > toolbar (Gnome, Apple, Microsoft) > > -- > Shaun > > > > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-doc-list mailing list > gnome-doc-list gnome org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
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