Re: hiding menu entries

[Peter Forbes <forbesp idirect com>]

Mark Galassi wrote:
> 
> On the issue below I agree with Toshio: I find it pedagogically
> confusing when a program sometimes does not have some menu entrie, and
> sometimes it does.
> 
> One example that has frustrated me is FrameMaker+SGML, where the
> SGML-related menus change a lot according to what type of document you
> are editing.
> 
> The "explanation" feature would be awesome!  You would want the
> greyed-out area to be highlighted differently as the mouse sits on
> it.

Sorta related (I guess, really, a UI/gtk issue):

One feature I really like, (at least, that has a lot of potential
to be useful) about (gasp) Windows 95 is the little question mark
button on the title bar which when clicked, sets the cursor to
a pointer with a question mark. Clicking on a screen object (like
a button) brings up context sensitive help.

This is alot easier than paging through acres of help files
to find some explanation of wonky behaviour. Assuming the
documentation is there and well written, and that it answers
your question, of course.

I was thinking this could be very easily done with gtk, with
a signal attached to the widget class, "help", and a program
specific way of invoking the help function (and a standard
way supplied by gnome). The window manager would supply the
question mark button and handle whatever transactions with
your application were required to do this.

IMHO, help files should be extremely verbose, and document
EVERYTHING the program is actually doing, so that people
who don't care (users) can ignore any extra help, but
administraters or power users can know just what the
hell is going on when you click this innocent looking
button. Glossy GUIs should hide these things, yes, but
not to the extent that you have to use the source (or
the binary!) to find out what side effects a program is
having, or what EXACTLY it's doing when you choose item
"foo" from the menu. (at least when the program has
potential for side effects, like a mail reader or other
network applications, or programs that spawn other
programs).

The relation: a greyed out widget could still respond
to a help request, and the help file would document
why exactly the widget is unavailable.


	Peter.