Re: Menu Guidelines

[zinie cs unibo it (Enrico Zini)]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 06:47:28PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:

> Since "Close" only makes sense in a document-based app, perhaps it would
> help to always include the relevant document and application name in
> those menu items?  E.g.:
> 
>    Close myhomepage.html  Ctrl-W
>    Quit Mozilla Ctrl+Q

I think we have to distinguish two cases of multi-document application.

In one, we have an application that provides an environment that contains
many windows (à la Gimp).  In this case, 'Close this window' and 'Close
The Gimp' have two clearly different meanings: the first one closes a
window inside the environment, the other one shuts down the entire
environment (e.g. The Gimp toolbox and the other dialogs, that can exist
even if there are no images loaded).

In the other case, we have many distinct windows the user can't tell
if they are multiple instances of the same application or multiple
documents open inside a single one, and really does not have to care to.

I'm thinking about Mozilla here: you might open a browser window with the
right-click submenu on an URL in the Gnome Terminal or clicking an URL
icon on the desktop, or selecting a voice under some 'Help' menu.  Why
should I need to 'Close Mozilla'?  Why should I need to know what is
managed by Mozilla, anyway?

We could take another application like Abiword, that has the same MDI
structure.  Why should I need to close all my word processors, if they
appear as logically unrelated works?  I'd like to close, perhaps, 'all
documents for the university exams', but to keep working on 'all documents
with my literary creations'.

Perhaps it could be more useful an option to close a 'browsing thread',
that is all windows that generated from a single window with clicks on
'open in a new window' or 'create a new window', but then this new feature
would need some round of design and careful user testing to really
identify what a 'thread' is in a browser, in a word processor and so on.

In a way or another, the only useful application for the 'Quit Mozilla'
button that I can think of is when Mozilla hangs on all windows, and
becomes then identifiable as a *single* entity.  In that case I would
really want to close it, but then, if it hung, eh...


Bye, Enrico

--
GPG public key available on finger -l zinie cs unibo it