Re: [HIG] proposed policy issues

[Matthew Thomas <mpt mailandnews com>]

Calum Benson wrote:
>...
> I'm happy enough to simplify the View/Toolbar menu stuff, as long as
> we still specify a consistent way of doing it.

It's not practical to use exactly the same style for every app. If there
are only two or three toolbar-like panels (e.g. Toolbar, Formatting Bar,
Status Bar), making a submenu for them would be rather odd. However, the
more such items you have (Mozilla Navigator will probably eventually
have six, for example), and the more other items you have in the `View'
menu, the greater the likelihood that the menu will become too long so
that you will need to put those items in a submenu. Another thing to
keep in mind is that the second item is the most visible item in any
menu, and you may have something more important to use it for than the
second of however many toolbars you have.

> Not quite so sure about losing the recommended toolbar layouts-- the
> toolbar is about the most striking thing you see when you first start
> a new app, and it's rather unsettling when it looks a bit different
> from the others on your desktop for no particularly good reason.  One
> of the things that makes the office suites work well together is the
> consistency of their toolbar layouts, for example, I don't know how
> happy I'd be to leave it all to the developer's whim.
>...

As always, it depends on how close the tasks are. It's more important
that, say, the toolbars of a word processor and a spreadsheet are fairly
consistent with each other, than that the toolbars of a word processor
and a mucic notation editor are consistent with each other, which in
turn is more important than that the toolbars of a word processor and a
Web browser are consistent with each other. As the tasks get further
away from each other, consistency between them becomes less important,
and optimization of the design for the individual app becomes more important.

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