Re: Menus

[sungod <as387 yfn ysu edu>]

Khimenko Victor wrote:

> > one could make it a different shade of grey, or use a stroke-out font or a
> > million other possibilities. the point is that it's gotta be visible.
> 
> I'm not so sure...

the apple style guide specifies that unavailable menu choices be grayed
out. they have quite a lot to say about consistency; if you haven't read
their human interface guidelines document, please do. they've done quite
a lot of research and testing that would be shameful to throw away.

i've even seen this principle in action: i had to teach a few of my more
brick-like coworkers how to use word, and many of them were confused
when all documents were closed, since most of the menus disappeared. i
can vouch authoritatively that making menus and menu choices appear and
disappear depending on context is inconsistent and confusing. let's work
on alternate approaches to graying out, instead, shall we? that one's
pretty well confirmed.

> > think about a netscape version installed at a public access terminal. you
> > know netscape. you would be at least temporarily confused if its menus would
> > suddenly look totally different.
> 
> Yes, but not much. "It's public place -- of course it's special version of
> Netscape with few features stripped". But if features are grayed this will be
> MUCH more confusing: "Hm. This looks exactly like Netscape at home. But why
> is "Save as" grayed? It's grayed at home when there are no document to save
> but I'm see document right here on screen! Is it Netscape broken or what ?"

this is a much better argument for menu themeability than for making
menu choices appear and disappear. i'm warming up to the idea of menu
themeability, but it still requires someone to actually sit down and
code it, so let's hold off on the dan-kaminsky-ism for a while in the
meantime, shall we?

> > you can always edit the source...
> 
> ONLY if it's OSS. And all GNOME applications will be OSS in exactly one case:
> if GNOME will never be popular enough to make commercial proprietary programs
> for GNOME. Does not look like a good perspective to me !

good point. "utsl" is not a viable configuration issue for gnome or the
style guide. :) are we generally agreed?
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