[Usability] Consistency 1: more Stock items, Discard for example.

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

I've been noticing lots of inconsistencies recently and one that
particularly grabbed my attention and serves as a reasonably good example
is what I will refer to as "Discard" for short.

When an application or document is closed, users are often asked if they
wish to Save, Cancel or Discard the Unsaved changes.  Discard perfectly
describes the action in a terse technical and straighforward way (Gnumeric
uses it and it seems to be the standard in KDE) but is not the most
obvious or user friendly way choice of words and quite reasonably various
applications have tried to come up with better/alternative wordings such
as "Do Not Save", "Don't Save" (gedit, Mozilla Composer), "Close", "Close
without Saving" (conglomerate?), "Discard changes".  I even mandaged to
find two different wordings used within the same application.

I think it was while looking at "Don't Save" in gedit and noticing both an
abbreviation and a negative that I had to stop and think until I figured
out why a relatively trivial detail was really bothering me and I came to
the conclusion that it was the inconsitency that really bothered me.

Although we cannot agree on the best label I think we can safely agree the
same task is being performed and can be standardised and should only be
changed in one place.  My preferred fix would be to go with Discard and
provide a good tooltip but I've filed and bug report and I think
providing a good stock button is the best way to go.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158008

The reason I bring this up here is that
1) I think it could probably provide a patch for to add a stock
discard button given a little push in the right direction and i thought
this was the best place to ask
2) and I believe there are other areas where tasks and widgets could be
standardised with a good API even if we are unsure of the best way to
present them to end users.

I believe we can improve consistency and usability and make it easier for
developers to program by providing a more comprehensive choice of stock
widgets.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
Alan's Journal http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com

P.S. apologies for the spelling mistakes.