RE: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Jörg Rathlev <joerg jrsoftware de>]

> > No, they do very different things!
> 
> Certainly they do in one respect-- as your quote eloquently describes!  
> 
> But at a higher level of abstraction, you could argue that a browser's
> Back/Forward buttons *are* the same as a druid's: they both move you one
> step at a time in either direction along a linear path of pages that you
> have visited, do they not?  And they both allow you to back up and
> choose to go down a different path if you went the wrong way.

Yes, the "Back" button is actually very similar -- it will, in both a browser and a druid, take you to the page where you have been before. "Previous" and "back" are the same in a druid.

However, in a web browser, the "Forward" button won't do anything unless you used the "Back" button before. In a druid, you *have* to use it. That's why I think it sould be labeled differently.

"Next" and "Previous" also match with "step". Since a druid is a step-by-step dialog, you don't need any weird explanations like "Forward takes you to the next step, with back, you can go back to the previous step". Since you would say "next step" and "previous step" anyway, you can have a much simpler explanation like "Use the Next and Previuos buttons to move through the steps of the dialog."

BTW, the german labels in wizard-like dialogs are mostly "Zurueck" and "Weiter", which I would translate as "Back" and "Go on".

"Go on" is not such a bad idea, actually... what do you think?


Joerg