"Safe delete" featured in Interface Hall of Shame

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

I have found this site very useful for developers of user interfaces:
http://iarchitect.com/

"Safe delete" in mc:
http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/safe_delete.png
is strikingly similar to this:
http://iarchitect.com/errormsg.htm#ERROR39

Fortunately, "Safe delete" is disabled by default.  But even code disabled
by default needs to be maintained, or it can become very "unsafe" to use.

I have found that some translations (Russian and Japanese - just two of
the four I checked) ask to type "yes" in English but compare the resulting
text to the translated version of "yes".  In other words, users have to
guess it, or the recursive delete won't work.

I have never seen bugreports about this.  Does it mean that nobody uses
"Safe delete" and it's safe to delete? :-)

As an intermediate solution, I suggest that "Safe delete" stays, but its
only effect will be changing the default button to "no" in the delete
dialogs.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin