RE: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Jorg Rathlev <joerg jrsoftware de>]

> > Well why don't we use what the web browsers use.  Everyone 
> knows how to use
> > a web browser so if they use back and next in their navigation bars 
> > in their international versions, maybe we should do the same with this
> > situation in gnome
> 
> It's not a bad idea, my only reservation would be what I touched on in
> my last post-- druid buttons and web browser buttons don't do *quite*
> the same thing.  But maybe the distinction is too subtle to bother the
> average user... something else to usability test  :)

No, they do very different things!


I quote from the "Web Style Guide", Yale University Press:

<quote>

*"Going back" and going to the previous page*   All hypertext systems share a common feature that has no direct precedent in print media: going "back" through a series of links you have previously visited is not the same as paging "back" through the preceding pages of an ordered sequence of pages. When users click on a hypertext link in a Web document they often are transported from one Web site to another, perhaps even from one country to another. Once made, the hypertext link is bidirectional; you can "go back" to the Web site you just left by clicking on the "Back" button of the viewer. Having the "Back" button, you can move to the new Web site again by hitting the "Forward" button:

[ First Web ]       Hypertext link
[   Site    ] <--------------.
              "Back"         |
                             |
                             |
 Second Web site             | "Forward"
 (a sequence of pages)       V

[ p.3 ] <--> [ p.4 ] <--> [ p.5 ] <--> [ p.6 ]
             "Previous                 "Next
              Page"                     Page"


(...)

*Fixed versus relative links*   Unlike the "Back" and "Forward" buttons in such Web viewers as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, whose functions are relative only to the pages you have seen most recently, "Next Page" and "Previous Page" buttons in a document are fixed links you provide to associated documents.

</quote>

Note that the image looks somewhat better in the printed book :-)


Joerg