Re: [HIG] Policy questions

[Matthew Thomas <mpt mailandnews com>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> Matthew Thomas wrote:
>...
> > I predict that either of these would frustrate users considerably.
> > In addition, the more usable a theme was (i.e. the more contrast it
> > made between the default button and non-default buttons), the more
> > unstable it would look as focus was moved between controls.
> 
> So what do you suggest?

That the Enter key in a single-line text field should always activate
the default button.

>...
> Can't say it's a problem I've ever had myself when using Windows, but
> anyways... the underlying problem here is that people can't reliably
> predict what's going to happen when they drag something from one place
> to another, so they do it with the right button to make sure they can
> pick the right action at the end.  This is certainly the only reason I
> use it, and in particular when dragging files/aliases around, because
> (in Windows at least), you get different behaviour depending on
> whether you're dragging a folder, an executable, a document or a link,
> and then again depending on whether you're dragging within a volume or
> from one volume to another.  This behaviour may or may not be
> "logical" or "safe", but half the time it's never what I want and I
> can never remember what's actually going to happen anyway.

I cannot agree less with making shortcut menus massively harder to use
as a workaround for programs (or, in the case of MS Windows, desktop
environments) which can't get their act together to behave consistently
for drag and drop.

> So, the real solution is really to make drag behaviours completely
> consistent and predictable, but any time we have that discussion we
> re-discover that it's kind of hard :)
>...

Seems fairly simple to me ... You want some guidelines for that, then? :-)

-- 
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing
<http://mozilla.org/>