Re: property dialogs

[Per Lewau <perle lysator liu se>]

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, Derek Simkowiak wrote:

> > > Therefore, I suggest that GNOME should use something like this:
> > > 
> > > <OK/Accept> <Preview/Test> <Cancel>
> > > 
> > I like this a *lot*.  I think it is clear for all users, and allows
> > them to do what they want.
> 
> 	Agreed!  The "Apply" button is a horrible microsoftism.  Let's
> just remember that if you hit "Preview", hitting Cancel will STILL UNDO
> THE CHANGES, which is not the case with all ms products.

First a semantic question: Does the "Ok" mean that the active settings are
ok or does it mean that whatever is set in the dialogue fields is ok?

Buttons labeled this way implies a modal dialogue. It implies that I
should edit options and then close the dialogue. This is not good. I think
modeless dialogues are better. For instance, in FrameMaker 5.0 you have
only "Apply" and the closing of the window is up to the WM. In FM you
often work with paragraph templates and why would I want to close a
dialogue I'm going to use soon again? Thus, you don't preview the setting
you "Apply" the changes in the dialogue (call it "Use" or whatever),
however it's not question of previewing. 

My point is that "Preview" is not very general. Also, "Cancel" normally
means that the dialogue is closed; why do I want to do this? If I made a
faulty setting and hit "Cancel" I don't want to reopen the dialogue again.

The most general dialogue button labels I can think of are "Apply"
(perhaps "Use" since "apply" is a bit technical), "Close" and "Undo".
Actually the "Close" could be skipped and left to the WM instead. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Per Lewau (perle@lysator.liu.se)Student of Computer Science at the 
				University of Linkoping, 
				Sweden. 
"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?"
						- Hobbes