Re: RSG

[Tom Vogt <tom lemuria org>]

Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com> wrote:
> > this is NOT an official document, nor is it in any way related to the
> > "official" Gnome styleguide that is being developed by Bowie Poag.

> contribute opinions and ideas via the bi-weekly development conferences
> held on IRC. Dan, Bill and I are -maintaining- the project, which is far
> different than "developing" it.

I put "maintained by Bowie Poag and others" in there. I want to keep that
thing short, just avoid confusion.



> > the purpose of this document is to set forth guidelines for a consistant
> > Gnome Look & Feel.
> 
> You cant dictate "look and feel".

no, but you can define guidelines. as it's written there. :)


while we're there: some of the comments have been silently integrated one
way or the other in the document. I'll only comment where I think a comment
is appropriate.


> Compliancy levels shouldalso  be in ascending order, not descending. C5
> should be bare minimum, not C1, if you insist on abbreviating them that
> way.

what do others think about this?



> > C4 - Optional (fringe feature)
> >      "Nice to have" features that are considered useful, but may not
> >      be appropriate for all programs and are not necessary even where
> >      appropriate.
> 
> How the heck are you gonna judge this concretely? This is way too big of a
> gray-area. Try defining things more precisely here.

look further down. parts of the styleguide have and/or will have a c4 rating
beside them. for example, I put that new suggestion of a dialog "gnome
enhanced, you don't have gnome, some stuff might not work" as a c4 feature.


> > C5 - Under Development (cutting edge, not official style yet)
> >      Experimental features that are not fully implemented or
> >      supported yet.  (Will fall into C4 or C3 when fully realized)
> 
> These types of applications dont belong in the public domain to begin
> with, and therefore should not be judged for compliancy.

maybe c5 will become redundant once the styleguide is fleshed out. for the
development of it, I consider this category very useful.



> Again, "Prog" is an indeterminant word. There is absolutely no reason to
> truncate this from "Program". If you do so, you break visual consistancy.
> Thats a no-no. If youre going to do that, theres almost no point in even
> writing a style guide to begin with. If you dont set a good example, do
> you think anyone is going to come along that will?

I'd like to collect more opinions on "Prog". anyone else got something to
say? otherwise we can vote and it would be an uninteresting 1:1 :)


> > C1 -  If a menubar is not present in an application, two buttons
> > must be present somewhere labeled "Help" and "Exit". If the help
> > for that application does not contain "About" information ( see
> > below ) then an additional "About" button must also be provided.
> 
> And where do these buttons go?

it says "somewhere". which I would read as in "depending on the app, put it
where it fits in". if you have an app without a menubar, you're most
probably already in the realm of the unusual. forcing you to put those
buttons, say in the bottom would in most cases only result in a
non-compliant or ugly program. maybe something could be SUGGESTED, but that
wouldn't be a c1 feature then.


> > C2 - The "Help" menu must contain at least one entry called
> > "Gnome", that starts the Gnome helpbrowser with its main page.
> 
> Hmmm.. Ill think about this one more before commenting.

was my temp fix to prevent empty help menus now/if we move "about" to the
"Prog" menu. :)


> > C4 - [Pie Menus]
> 
> Untested theories do not belong in style guides. They belong in public
> forums for debate, and THEN subsequent inclusion. Notice I dont intend on
> mandating color-reactiveness into UISG V2.0 .. Despite the fact that I
> think its an excellent idea. :)

a) it's c4, which means: cool, but you don't need it
b) it's not fleshed out, and we'll see if it stays there. for the moment I
think we'll leave it there and just wait and see. once a couple real
programs are working with pie menus we'll opt on either dropping that or
moving it up to c3.


> > C2 - All dialogs should set the titlebar with an appropriate
> > string.
> 
> Justified in which direction?

the wm does the justification here, doesn't it?



-- 
The universe does not have laws -- it has habits, and habits can be broken.