Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

["Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>]

>> > And the wording on that button should be chosen carefully-- there's
>> > nothing worse than having a message box pop up that says "you've just
>> > lost all your data", with a single button labelled "OK"... (or even
>> > "Cancel", for that matter!)
>> 
>> Yes. I'm really not sure what that should be. "OK" is inappropriate
>> for something that's not really ok. "Cancel" is misleading. "Close"
>> implies modeless, which may or may not be the case... 

>I don't think you can sensibly specify in a styleguide what the exact
>wording should be in this situation-- it really depends on the message
>being displayed.  It's these sort of decisions that keep people like me
>in a job  :o)

In Norway "Ok" is more like "Yes, very much please!". Some years ago a
family in Italy was a bit pissed because I told a family the dinner was
"okey".
Words are funny things..

What I would like when it comes to descriptions of UI's and how and why
is to have a description which says "this has properties A and all the
components
with those properties are placed according to description B". If by any
reason
that description B is changed the whole styleguide don't break.

Imagine this nifty ascii art of a list dialog

          +-------------------+
    ------+ +---------------+ +------
  (   New | | Query         | | Ok    )
   >------+ +---------------+ +------<
  (  Find | Item 1 Foo        | Apply )
   >------+ Item 5 Bar Bar    +------<
  (   Del | Item 8 Gizmo      | Close )
    ------+ Item 219 Brumpf   +------
          +-------------------+

Sure it looks ugly (I think it's cute.. gee..) but how du you describe it
in a way that is easy to grasp for a programmer and a user? (It even
maintains
workflow from left to right!)

I belive it is very important to defines rules for the UI that don't break
if some vendor makes a funny UI. A style guide should not say put the dialog
buttons on the bottom of the dialog, or at the right side or whatever. I've
even found dialogs with a menubar at the left side and with buttons. A bit
more common are dialogs with web-like interfaces.

John Blad