Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs (2nd draft)

[colin z robertson <c z robertson ndirect co uk>]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 12:29:08AM +0100, Guillermo S. Romero /
Familia Romero wrote:
> c z robertson ndirect co uk (2001-03-06 at 2255.17 +0000):
> 
> Nice doc, but
> 
> >         <para>
> >           Navigation buttons: If the dialog contains a sequence of
> >           steps (as in a wizard, for example), they should be navigable with
> >           buttons labelled "Previous" and "Next". These buttons should have the
> >           accelerators "p" and "n" respectively.
> >         </para>
> 
> how many no English speaking people will use "p" and "n"? IMO it
> should be changed to underlining letters of the buttons' text or
> similar clues. At least remember the coder that this thing must be
> i18n and l10n, be it underscores or other things.

Well, my thinking was that "p" and "n" (actually it should be alt-p
and alt-n, shouldn't it?) would be for English language systems
only... Which raises an interesting question: How should the UI
guidelines deal with i18n?

So far I've just put in all the labels in English, and obviously these
will be different for other locales. Given that the UI guidelines will
probably not be translated into all the languages for which people are
localising interfaces, how should I represent all these labels?

The only thing I can think of is to create a table of objects and
their locale-specific labels, and have the text constantly referring
to the table. It would make the guidelines somewhat unpleasant to
read.

Does anyone have any better suggestions?

colin

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