Y.A. menu bar proposal

["Justin Ross" <opiskin hotmail com>]

I'm encouraged by the direction the gnome ui is taking.  I think it will 
be more sensible than what I've had to use before.  What follows is a 
product of what I've learned from this list and things I have (of 
course) robbed.  It's my vision of things.

The logic of the toplevel menu editor is that of descending scope.  That 
is, the App menu has the broadest scope, 'Document' is next since it 
treats the whole document, and 'Edit' follows since it deals with 
subselections or parts within the docemunt.  The area in brackets would 
be for additional menus of items which (at least optionally) operate on 
parts of the document.  The menus in curly braces are 'meta' menus.  
That is, they deal with aspects of the session, not directly with 
document content.  If there are too few items for these menus, those 
items could be relocated under 'App'.  Also, I prefer the 'Help' menu 
left-justified: I don't forget about it that way.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------
| App  Document  Edit  [Insert  Format]  {View  Windows  Help}  |
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I am in full agreement with those on this list who would like to split 
Application-scope items off from the 'File' menu.  I haven't followed 
the posts of the last four days well enough to know quite what people 
want to put here, but these seem sensible

| App |
-------------------------
| About <This App>	| <-- It's better to keep the noun with this
-------------------------     one, as newbies need it to be exlicit.
| Settings...		| <-- or Preferences or Options
-------------------------
| Quit			| <-- I prefer this over 'Exit' because in my
-------------------------     mind it better suggests the result: the 
			      death of a process.  'Exit' suggests
                              that it will still go on, and I can                                   
still 're-enter' this same process.

It's not so important to me that this one be labeled 'Document' by 
default, though I prefer it.  The 'Document' menu lists functions that 
operate on the whole document as a rule, not parts of it.  Of course, it 
will be intuitive to break our own rule in some cases.  For instance, I 
would like the option to 'Print selection' from the Print dialog. 

| Document |
-------------------------
| New...		|  Document access and preservation: these 
| Open...		|  items are related principally tofilesystems
| Open Recent	      > | <-- I prefer this to the Microsoft way
| Save			|
| Save As...		|
-------------------------
| Acquire             > |
| Print...		|  Area for accessing and outputting to 
| Print Preview...	|  non-filesystem devices.  Normally scanners 
-------------------------  and printers.
| Properties...		|  
-------------------------		
| Close			|
-------------------------

'Edit' really has the sense of 'Copy editing', not 'Edit such-and-such'.  
This menu should deal with selections in the document and parts of the 
document (as with objects), not with the 'whole document'.  Presumably, 
that's what the 'Document' menu is for.  And I think this is important: 
the 'Edit' menu would seem to accept just about every menu function 
which operates on a document.  That's a bit hyperbolic, but true enough.  
However, we don't want an inordinately big 'Edit' menu, so we should 
allow the interface designer to export a large group of menu items to 
their own menu.  For instance, if an editor has a slew of search 
options, they might be moved out of the 'Edit' menu to  their own 
toplevel 'Search' menu.

| Edit |		   
-------------------------   
| Undo			| <-- I'm thinking we should have both of 
| Redo			|     these and grey out either or both if
-------------------------     unavailable
| Cut			| Operations on arbitrary selections 
| Copy			|
| Paste			|
| Delete		| <-- 'Delete' is better than 'Clear' in 
| [and mone variations] |     this case since it matches the 
-------------------------     keyboard label.
| Select All		| Things which define arbitrary selections
| Invert Selection	|  
-------------------------
| Publish		| Object stuff -- I prefer the MacOS semantics
| Subscribe		| in this case.
-------------------------
| Find...		| Things which seek inside a document
| Replace...		|
| Jump To...		|
-------------------------

I have opinions about the meta menus too.  I'll post again with those 
later.

Thanks,
Justin

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