Re: i've asked the question; now i'll give my opinion

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico nuclecu unam mx>]

>  the question i've been begging everyone to answer is, what line are we
>  drawing? are we aimed at compatibility with existing guis, or are we
>  aimed at good design? 

Both.

Compatibility with exising user interfaces is very important, since
people are already used to them.  We want non-techie computer users to
be able to learn how to use the Gnome desktop as easily as posible.

Good user interface design is dictated both by usability testing and
by established conventions.  To do the former you need to ask a third
party to sit down and use the application you are testing, and see
what happens.  The latter involves stealing as much as possible from
existing user interfaces :-)

>  to which i would respond, firstly, why _not_ revolutionary, and
>  secondly, if not gnome, who? i'll gladly go join their project  instead.

<HHOS>
Berlin.  Or Freedows.
</HHOS>

>  line. for example, raster's antialiased fonts in enlightenment are quite
>  revolutionary for x: it is not an easily implemented change; it requires
>  rewriting a large portion of x or implementing it at windowmanager level
>  instead (the latter of which has been the chosen route).

Antialiased fonts are not revolutionary, and yes, X sucks.  And the
window manager has nothing to do with them.  Enlightenment has
antialiased font support because it has to look good, not because the
window manager is "the" place to put antialiased font code.  Please
look a bit at the technical side of things before making claims like
this.

If anyone really wants to contribute to the GNOME UI Guidelines
effort, the only thing that person needs to do is take the Mac Human
Interface Guidelines [1] and distill whatever is useful to the GNOME
project into our own document.  The reason I haven't done it myself is
lack of time.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-2.html

  Federico