[HIG] Re: GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

[snickell stanford edu]

I would like to personally apologize for the way the material was
presented. I hope you will all forgive me and be willing to look past
that in our future interactions.> i've read parts of it, and will
continue to digest it over the coming
> 
> days/weeks. there is a lot of good information in there, and a lot
> that is 
> not applicable to KDE. unless, of course, we decide to make sweeping
> changes 
> like change the order of buttons in dialogs.  there are also a number
> of 
> differences between how the widgets behave (e.g. spinboxes with
> integrated 
> text in KDE vs static text outside in GTK).

1) I don't know if this is feasible within KDE, but the HIG in GNOME is
putting pressure back on the toolkit to get changes made. As I said,
where a guideline is truly divergent for technical reasons which can't
be easily changed, its not difficult to provide slightly different
guidelines. I think we're talking about 5-10% of the material here, not
a huge amount.

2) It is interesting that you bring up dialog button order. The HIG
actually required a sweeping change in GNOME on that front. A
reflective-of-what-exists interface is guide is somewhat useful, but not
*nearly* as useful as an interface guide that pushes on the status quo
to achieve better usability (and of course, it is very important to
recognize the cost of each change in terms of user unfamiliarity as a
usability factor too). Actually, my guess is that KDE as it stands today
is already closer to the HIG reccomendations than GNOME 1.4 was.

> i think it is great reference material and where it makes sense we
> should 
> align our efforts w/each other (e.g. both GNOME and KDE use 6/12
> spacing), 
> but to expect a common guideline with the amount of detail that is in
> the 
> GHIG would be asking one project or the other to compromise/change
> quite a 
> bit.

Of course, though if we can get rid of the "where the guidelines came
from" mentality I think we're all a lot better. As I said above, I think
KDE would require less change to comply with the guidelines than GNOME
1.4 (the last release before the HIG began influencing development).

What I'm saying is that if you accept my claim that KDE 3 is closer to
the HIG than GNOME 1.4 was, in some sense I'm not asking for anything
from KDE that I didn't ask from the GNOME project too. Following a set
of interface guidelines *will* require change, because guidelines only
matter when something needs changing ;-)

-Seth