Re: schema files

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Janne <jan.moren@lucs.lu.se> writes:

> On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 14:35, Ole Laursen wrote:
> > '> What I tried with point i) above is to stress the need for actually
> > > useful <long> descriptions; descriptions that explain in more detail
> > > than the <short> description what they key actually does control and
> > > what alternate settings for this key there are etc. Such descriptions
> > > add much valuable information for the users that need to modify the
> > > values of such keys.
> > 
> > I agree with that - but many things are more or less self-evident. For
> > instance, the key "applet_height". Having "Applet height" is OK for a
> > short text, but adding "Height of the applet in pixels." for the long
> > text is non-sensical. One might as well reformulate the short text to
> > "Applet height in pixels".
> 
> Those cases certainly does exist and aren't all that uncommon. Why not
> set the long description to be identical to the short one? It's a quick
> cut-n-paste job for the developer, it creates exactly zero extra work
> for translators, and the users won't feel that they have missing info
> when looking at an empty description field. We could use "This field
> intentionally left blank" in the grand old IBM tradition, but I feel
> this is a better solution.

Then it would be better to modify the tools to check for missing long
descriptions and have them insert the short instead, if it is
appropriate for the particular tool. For example, I don't think it is
a good idea with gconf-editor where both descriptions are just next to
each other.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/