[Usability] The use of ellipsis (...) in menus

[Sergej Kotliar <sigge hystrix se>]

Hi!

This is my first e-mail to the usability list, although I've been
hanging around GNOME for quite a while.

First some background on the situation:
When translating some apps into Swedish, I noticed some strings had
triple dots (...) after them. Turned out - most of them were in the
menus. Since I had never thought about their existence, I decided to
find out what they meant. By looking at different apps, I couldn't
consistently find the common denominator of the actions that had the
three dots. A google search showed that in both Microsoft and Apple
Human Interface Guidelines, these three dots symbolize that the action
needed additional data to be entered, most likely opening a new window
for that data. As a result - "Save As..." has this, and "Save" doesn't.

The three dots are also referred to as an ellipsis character, and can be
typed in as a single unicode character instead of three actual dots.

When trying to prove this to myself in GNOME, I looked at some of the
most used apps (gedit, eog, nautilus, epiphany, terminal), and notice
that they all treat this rule a bit differently. Where one app had the
three dots, another would not. There were even some inconsistencies
within the apps themselves. Just look around the File menu of the
mentioned apps and notice how they all treat things like Print, Save as,
Open differently. Another way is looking at different apps doing the
same things - KDE, Firefox etc, the differences areWhen it comes to less
obvious actions it seems arbitrary in many cases, whether the ellipsis
will be used or not. Another easy way of noticing the differences in
interpretation of the ellipsis is by looking at menus of two apps that
do the same thing. 

Me not having noticed their existence at all before, I asked around
friends and family - all computer users, but not leet in any way whether
they new these things were there. The answer was just like I thought -
nobody knew they existed. And everyone could work just fine without
them. 

So - what to do about these little things, that have been around since
the days of Win3.1 (and probably much earlier)? As I see it, there's
three ways to go:

* Remove them completely. State in the HIG that they shouldn't be used. 
* Define more clearly exactly when they should be used, and file bugs
for each app and occasion of wrongful use. This will probably result in
quite a lot of bugs
* Do nothing. Status quo remains.

What I think (and this is where I say I'm in no means an expert in the
area), it that we should go with removing them entirely from the GNOME
HIG, and GNOME itself. My reasons for this are the following:

* Most people don't notice them, and aren't helped by them.
* The people that do notice them might be confused by them.
* They are probably not translatable into all languages.
* They waste space (both disk space, and screen space)
* The use of the ellipsis is totally inconsistent between apps, and
largely depend on the author. Sometimes it's even inconsistent within an
app itself. 
* The use of three dots to indicate a dialog opening seems rather
oldfashioned - can't we have something better now? 
* In some cases, they hinder the reuse of the same string for multiple
purposes, causing extra translation work.

If people really feel that they do in fact fill some purpose, shouldn't
there at least be some kind of icon or something that is international
to indicate the opening of a new window?

What do you people think? Am I totally off here? 


Best regards
Sergej Kotliar

PS: please CC me, cause I'm not subscribed to this list.