Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs (2nd draft)

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

on 3/10/01 7:50 AM, John Kodis at kodis jagunet com wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 07:34:54PM +0000, colin z robertson wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 06:24:49PM -0500, Liam Quin wrote:
>>> * remember to give the dialogue a title, and to give enough information
>>> to help the user contextualise it. Imagine the user went for lunch and
>>> came back to see the dialogue.
>>> For example, "OK to delete file?" is hopeless, because the user won't
>>> know which file, nor what the consequences are of saying yes or no.
> 
> I think that it's a mistake to count on the window manager to
> compensate for failings of an application developer.  While I agree
> that an "Okay to delete file?" dialog is hopeless, this is because the
> author of the dialog didn't provide enough information.  A dialog that
> reads "Okay to delete file 'letter-to-mom.abw'?", displayed in a
> dialog box raised and centered over an Abiword window would be quite
> unambiguous.
> 
>> Do people use window managers that display a title in dialogs? Should
>> we be using them? The Sawfish theme I'm using at the moment doesn't.
> 
> One of the things that I value most about Sawfish (as well as Gnome
> and Unix in general) is the flexability that it gives me.  The more
> that assumptions of this sort (windows must have borders; borders must
> include a titlebar; titlebars must include a title; the title must
> compensate for poorly worded dialog boxes; ...) are hard-coded in
> applications that I use, the less flexability I have, and the less I
> like it.
> 
> The home-brew theme that I normally use has no titles on any window
> frame types except for shaded windows.  This has never proved an
> inconvenience for me, since I recognize windows by their contents
> rather than by their titles (i.e., I can tell that a window is running
> Netscape because it's displaying Netscape rather than because its
> titlebar reads "Netscape").  It also buys me an extra bit of screen
> space for the application.

The flip side of this argument is that you can save screen real estate by
relying on the widgets in the window borders. Specifically, the close box.
If there's no guarantee that the window border will contain a close box,
then every window has to have a big fat button in it somewhere to close the
window. If it's a modeless window, that may very well be the only button in
the window, and thus it wastes an entire horizontal stripe across the bottom
of the window that is much taller than the title bar of any sane window
manager.

John