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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: Standard questions and answers
From:       Peter Penz <peter.penz () jk ! uni-linz ! ac ! at>
Date:       1999-09-15 9:07:03
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Derek wrote:
> 
> Is it possible to mention something in the new guidleines about giving
> the user sensible options to answer questions asked in dialogs?
No problem! But I currently want to finish the Close/Quit-topic (I
discuss it allready for 2 months...), so my time is limited.

Could you do a draft for this? If you want you can download a tarball of
the standards-page on 
http://www.esh.uni-linz.ac.at/~mother/hci/basics/index.html
=> please change dialogs/...... and mail it to me. If you don't have
time to do it in HTML: make a text-only version and I'll convert it to
HTML.

> It seems
> obvious, but if you ask a question like "Are you sure you want to do
> this?" the available options should be "Yes" or "No", NOT "OK" or
> "Cancel" or anything else.
Yes, we have to solve this...

> 
> This is still a remarkably common mistake. I will always remember this
> spectacular example from a Word Processor on my old Atari ST: You hit
> the application exit button with unsaved text, and it asks:
> 
>    -----------------------------------------------------
>    You have unsaved data. Are you sure you want to exit?
> 
>                       Quit    Cancel
>    -----------------------------------------------------
:-) Maybe a third button OK would solve the problem ;-)=)

> 
> Can we pin down some rules here? Dialogs should ask questions and offer
> Yes or No answers unless there is a good reason to phrase the question
> some other way. (There will be many good reasons of course, the point is
> that the programmer should think in Yes or No terms first.)
Do you wanna do this job? Be warned: there will be many discussions ;-)

Cheers,
Peter

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