Re: HIG Text Alignment [was Re: [Usability] Better look Re: (no subject)]

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 14 Dec, 2005, at 12:01 PM, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> ...
> > Yes, currently the HIG says: "Left-align components and labels,  
> > unless all the labels in a group have very different lengths. If they  
> > do, right-align the labels instead, to ensure that no controls end up  
> > too far away from their corresponding labels."
> ...
> > This encourages internal inconsistency, leftward imbalance, and  
> > columns of colons that almost line up but not quite. It's also an  
> > impractical guideline to follow, since you can't reasonably know how  
> > different the label lengths are going to be in every language your  
> > software is translated into, and translators can't specify the  
> > alignment themselves.
>
> Surely internationalisation would mean the point about variable string
> lengths could always be applicable if you wanted it to be.

Sure, and I take advantage of that whenever designing Gnome-based  
software myself. But most developers don't realize the possibility; and  
it's bad form for guidelines to say "do X, except when Y" if p(Y) ≈ 1.

Recently I spotted a good example of why the Gnome guideline doesn't  
make sense -- ironically from Kontact in KDE. In Kontact's normal  
composition window, the header field labels are similar lengths, so  
left alignment looks nearly as good as right alignment would  
<http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/reviews/nextgen-mua/kontact/ 
composer-normal.png>. But when you show more headers in the window,  
some of the labels suddenly become very far away from their fields,  
which looks awful  
<http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/reviews/nextgen-mua/kontact/ 
composer-all.png>. And switching them from left to right alignment  
depending on the presence of *other* headers would also be silly. Using  
right alignment consistently avoids this problem.

> ...
> The important issue is making sure the association of labels and the
> control is clear.  For accessibility this also needs to done
> programmatically anyway so perhaps there is some better way than
> alignment to better show this association to all users?

I don't think there needs to be, if colon alignment works fine.

> (Some kind of visual cue, prelighting, clickign on the text label  
> would do something to the associated control I dont know maybe  
> something like that.)
> ...

I would much rather that clicking on a text label (not counting the  
text for a checkbox, radiobutton, or expander) began a drag to move the  
window, just like clicking in any other non-interactive part of the  
window ... But that's another story.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/