Re: [Usability] ?extraneous text? in dialogs

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 18:57 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 02:24 +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> 
> > > Perhaps it should be updated with something along the lines of
> the 
> > > above?
> > > ...
> > 
> > Agreed. I'll submit a patch unless Calum gets there first. :-)
> 
> Go for it :)  The current "no explanatory text" guideline was written
> by
> the Sun docs folks for various reasons, when they were the major docs
> contributors-- not least, I suspect, to avoid opening the floodgates
> to
> a rush of additional 'help' text written by folks of lesser
> documentation adroitness than themselves, much of which they would
> have
> felt obliged to review and edit.  Which is fair enough, up to a
> point--
> nothing can turn a neat interface into a sloppy one more quickly than
> a
> dose of bad prose. 

This is one reason (the other being translatability)
that I think we should have regular string reviews by
people whom we can trust to do them well.  I have no
idea how we'd manage to coordinate them, but it would
have a drastic impact on our interfaces.

Even without additional blocks of explanatory text,
we have plenty of very awkward strings in a number
of our applications.  Some of them are just outright
wrong, while others are just stylisticly weird.

--
Shaun