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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Getting rid of yes/no (was: Re: Ideas for kde3 part II)
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-10-31 22:02:13
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On Wednesday 31 October 2001 12:54 am, Rob Kaper wrote:
bastian@kde.org | SuSE Labs KDE Developer | bastian@suse.com
-- > On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 12:25:09PM -0800, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > I would go for:
> >
> > "There are unsafed changes in Document1. Do you want to save or discard
> > the changes to Document1?"
> >
> > [Save] [Discard] [Cancel]
> >
> > Which is a very suitable candidate for a warningYesNoCancel box.
>
> Ah, thanks! You just made me realize _why_ I dislike those boxes. It's not
> even the yes/no part, it's mostly the cancel part.

cancel always results in a safe "nothing bad will happen" action. That's why 
it is always called "Cancel", you don't need to read the whole text to 
understand the implications of each action, pressing Cancel stops what you 
where about to do. That allows users to develop a simple "oh no, I didn't 
want that -> press cancel" style of reaction. For the same reason the "ESC" 
key always activates the Cancel button. Having a different text instead of 
Cancel would make that reaction basically impossible, because then you 
suddenly need to read the whole text, think of what each button would do and 
then realize that "Don't quit" is probably the one that you want.

Cheers,
Waldo
 
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