Re: What to use on GTK+3

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Sat, 8 Aug 2015, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 3:11 AM, Igor Korot <ikorot01 gmail com> wrote:
> > Emmanuele,
> >
> > On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > >  Use "Yes", but please: consider using a more descriptive label and icon 
> > > than
> > >  just "yes".
> > The "Yes", "No" and "Cancel" are legitimate button labels, especially if 
> > used
> > in one dialog.
>
> In some very few cases you may find yourself with no better option 
> than "yes", "no" or "cancel" as button labels in a dialog, 
> however, probably 99% of the time you can do better, and you do a 
> disservice to your users by choosing GTK_STOCK_OK just because you 
> were too lazy to search for a proper verb which describes the 
> consequent action properly.

Granted (and thanks for the interesting stackexchange reference 
infra). Giving options of just OK/Cancel seems to be generally 
suboptimal and in some cases positively evil.

However, in relation to Igor's original point, giving the user 
options of Yes/No is IMO fine if your dialog asks a short, simple 
question that requires an answer of Yes or No. As in

Overwrite <filename>? Yes/No
Send message? Yes/No
Really delete X? Yes/No

One could rephrase these messages as something other than Yes/No 
questions but would that actually be clearer? I doubt it. I'd want 
to see peer-reviewed psychological studies showing an error rate 
that was lower by a statistically significant margin before I 
believed that.

Allin Cottrell