Re: Style Guide suggestion

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

Hope I'm not jumping in on something already much-rehashed; I just
realized that I'd been unsubscribed from this list months ago, and I
thought it was just low-traffic...

On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, Gleef wrote:
> 
> So, I would say that my modified stance would be to:
>    1) Replace all references to a "File" menu in the style guide with a
>       "Main" menu.
>    2) Delete the sentence which says: 'In the event that "File" ["Main"]
>       is not appropriate, another label may be used in its place.'
>    3) If the application has a menubar and a dialog box to
>       modify the settings of the application, the menu item should be
>       "Main | Setup...".  If it doesn't have a menubar, whatever accesses 
>       the dialog should be labelled "Setup".

All sounds good - this is a major area of inconsistency. Another thing to
address is "Save settings" vs. settings that automatically save themselves
- very confusing. It's already worked out for preferences dialogs so if
apps have to use dialogs for prefs that solves it. I think they should
automatically save themselves if not in a dialog with an Apply button,
since the action is non-destructive and easily reversed. 

>    4) If the application has a menubar and a dialog box to modify the
>       configuration of the currently active document, the menu item should
>       be "Main | Configure...".  If it doesn't have a menubar,
>       whatever accesses the dialog should be labelled "Configure".
> 

The problem is that "Configure document" is nonsense in English, you can
only configure applications. How about "Edit Properties..." or "Document
Properties..." or "File Properties..."  or "Image Properties..." or
"Settings..." or "Attributes..." or something like that. There's no
appropriate standalone verb that I can think of.

While writing the menu section someone should flip a coin on whether to
capitalize each word of menu items or only the first...

Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp