Re: Word-a-Day: button, command button, toggle button

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Apr 30, 2008, at 5:18 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 18:44 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> ...
> > Ellipses are a site of rampant confusion in Gnome, thanks to
> > inconsistency in the HIG. But examples of buttons that correctly have
> > ellipses can be found in F-Spot's Add-in Manager ("Install 
> > Add-ins...", "Repositories...", "Uninstall..."), Inkscape's "Export 
> > Bitmap" window ("Browse...") and its "Fill and Stroke" palette 
> > ("Edit..."), and Epiphany's Personal Data window ("Clear All..."), to 
> > name just three.
>
> All right, we'll add this recommendations for buttons as well then.  
> Are there any other controls people are button ellipses on these days?

Occasionally an option menu contains an item with an ellipsis -- for 
example a color option menu might offer recently-used colors, with an 
"Other..." item at the end taking you to a colorpicker. That might come 
under "menus" in general, though, depending on how the style guide is 
structured.

> ...
> > If the application is being used in a text-only environment, then so 
> > is the help, and vice versa. So if the image is "marked up such that 
> > the icon has the same accessible text in the help as it does in the 
> > GUI itself", there will be no mismatch.
>
> You are I are using a text-only communications medium right now to 
> discuss graphical interfaces.  People use email all the time as 
> support forums.
>
> A text-only might also be used on web forums.  Inline images may be 
> technically possible, but it's too much of a hassle for a poster to 
> find the icon (possibly by creating a cropping a screenshot), upload 
> it, link it, etc.

Fair enough. Depending on the obviousness of the icon, it may be 
necessary for text-only documents to actually describe the icon, 
instead of just giving a label that people aren't seeing.

> ...
> Themes, generally, are a huge pain for documentation. Since many of 
> the big distros use a custom default theme, basically all of our 
> screenshots fail to match what many of our users actually see.
> ...

Encouraged by the manual template, Gnome applications routinely overuse 
screenshots in their help. So adjusting the manual template might be a 
first step to reducing this problem, followed by (in some cases) 
removing or (in others) heavily cropping screenshots in existing help 
files.

A further step would be switching to distributed version control. This 
would let distributions maintain branches where the screenshots showed 
their particular themes, while also merging changes from Gnome 
upstream. Any merge conflict in a screenshot would notify distributors 
that they needed to take a new screenshot themselves.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/