[Usability]Widgets and Controls - or - I just had to join the fun.

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

The mapping of widgets to controls is not one to one.

The control known as a button consists of at least the widget known
as a button and either the widget known as a label or some non-string
graphic and it may also consist of both in that disjunction being packed
into the widget known as a box.

The widget known as a scrolled window consists of at least two controls
of the type known as a scrollbar.


All of this is, for the most part, irrelevant. The word widget will appear
in programmer documentation and perhaps in development tools such as Glade.
The word control will appear in some developer documentation with one of
two meanings: 1) a end-user interface control, in discussion of end-user
interfaces; and 2) a Bonobo control, in discussion of Bonobo controls.
The word control may appear in end-user documentation, but this should
be rare (AFAIK) as such documentation will refer to particular controls by
particular names; e.g., button and menu.

Deviation from this scheme is almost certainly a sign of error. The error
may be hard to find and even harder to fix. Especially hard to fix is
the error which contained in the statement:

     We are running on X therefore we must assume that the user may run
     applications written with another toolkit and may be running
     another window manager.

Consider that one may run an X server on Windows, that the graphics
layer of Windows also permits non-standard UI, and that this hasn't
bothered Microsoft one bit.

That said, Windows does have an Appearance panel. It shows a little fake
window with fake controls. The label of the combo box which shows the
selected control is "Item". Wow. There are apps which run on Windows that
look nothing like what's in that panel; some of them aren't even rectangular.
You can even find apps which follow the settings in that panel, but for one;
sometimes the buttons look funny, sometimes the window frame is just
slightly weird. You can even run Windows with some shell other than
explorer.exe, yet Microsoft doesn't care and neither do the users. KDE has
followed suite here and, by golly, nobody seems to mind. CDE is similar.

Windows, KDE, CDE, OS/2, and surely others have some sort of integrated
"theme" panel. There are at least four designs to look at.


Cheers,
Greg Merchan

P.S. - See what happens when I don't get enough sleep?

P.P.S. - Why would anyone write a postscript when he can just revise?

P.P.P.S. - Down with footnotes! Up with postscripts!