Re: [HIG] conforming to the GDP word list

[Gregory Joseph Merchan <merchan reef phys lsu edu>]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 01:27:17AM -0700, Seth Nickell wrote:
> We need to make sure that our vocabulary is primarily being drawn from
> the GDP word list (at least wherever it makes sense to overlap). I've
> gone through and changed every sensible instance of "program" to
> "application" as a first pass, but we really should perform a careful
> audit of our word choices as they will likely affect application
> developers to some extent.

How many times do I have to restate this? Consider your audience!

The audience of a style guide is not the end-users of the system.
The audience of a style guide is the developers of the system.

This is evident even in the GDP word list which defines "application"
(a type of program) and uses "program" in almost every instance.

The audience of the HCI guidelines is the programmers; therefore and for
example even though "access key" is a better description than "mnemonic"
for the underlined letter in a widget label and even though calling that
a mnemonic is wholesale abuse of the language, that is what I'm going to
call it in the glossary and that is to what every synonym for that will 
point.

Greg Merchan