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List:       freedesktop-xdg
Subject:    Re: [PATCH] Add long comments to shared-mime-info XML file
From:       David Faure <dfaure () trolltech ! com>
Date:       2005-10-13 14:47:04
Message-ID: 200510131647.04324.dfaure () trolltech ! com
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On Thursday 13 October 2005 16:20, Dan Winship wrote:
> Christian Neumair wrote:
> > Maybe you could come up with alternate proposals?
> 
> Just kill off the acronym expansions completely. If the user doesn't 
> know what a CSS file is, telling them that it's a "Cascading Style 
> Sheet" is not really any more informative than telling them that it's 
> called a "Kaskadiĝanta Stilfolio" in Esperanto.

"All users are stupid" isn't really a way to design things.
Acronym expansion can be useful, for instance to disambiguate things.
"RPM file" can be either RealPlayer Media or RedHat Package Manager,
the acronym expansion is very useful in such a case.
Or for any other case where the user has seen this name before, but
3 letters is just too hard to remember. The explanation of the name can
help recognize things better. But not for trivial ones (many more people 
know "HTML" than they know what it stands for). 
No point in turning into an encyclopedia.

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).


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