Re: [Usability] HIG split?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 11:11 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On 10 Dec 2005, at 16:02, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> > Is there some plan to split the Human Interface Guidelines?
> > I would be very interested to know what was meant by this.
> 
> First I've heard about it if there is... unless it's another call to  
> split out the GNOME-specific and potentially-desktop-neutral bits,  
> which nobody's been sufficiently convinced about to do before.

>From a documentation perspective, please don't.  If we want to
develop desktop-neutral guidelines with other projects, great.
But people who are reading the HIG shouldn't have to bounce
back and forth between two documents.

When writing documents, especially reference documents, you
need to consider how people will find the information they
want.  Good indexes and proper cross references can help
considerably, but you want your information organized well
from the outset.

Putting the information into two different documents is
basically putting it into two categories.  It means that
if I want to know how much spacing to put between buttons
(for example), I first have to think, "Is this a Gnome
thing or a Freedesktop/Betterdesktop/etc thing?"

As I said, if people want to get together and publish some
desktop-neutral interface guidelines, wonderful.  That will
help to make applications in general feel more native, and
we all win.  But if that happens, please put all of those
shared guidelines directly in the Gnome HIG as well.

--
Shaun