From kde-look Mon Jul 03 16:08:13 2000 From: Magnus Ihse Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 16:08:13 +0000 To: kde-look Subject: Re: RFC: StyleGuide for Labels? (fwd) X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-look&m=96264049804710 On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Peter Putzer wrote: > *g* it should be: "This Is a Label for a Lineedit" Exactly. If we adopt the scheme you're pushing for, we'd see a lot more apps that break the style guide, and a lot of variants, such as "This Is A Label For A Line Edit" or "This is A Label For a Line edit" etc. > Such things can be looked up. Yes, but why put that extra burden on the programmer/UI designer/translator? If you can have a style guide that says: "Labels are written like sentences. First letter is uppercase, the rest is lowercase", why opt for something like "according to the chicago style manual, all verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc etc ..." > Not to blow my own horn, but I think my command of the English is > quite good, Good for you. :) I've found that it is more common for foregneirs (yeah, I'm swedish myself :)) to know the rules of capitalization on titles than for native english speaking people. :-) Just look at the track listing on any ordinary CD... > > The other two arguments for the first style that I can think of is: > > * it is easier to read > > Mhm... is it? I'm not too sure about that, but that MAY be a point. Yeah, but you Germans are used to the Use of Capitalization on all Nouns, so you doesn't count. ;-) But seriously, as a rule of thumb, lower case is easier to read than upper case. > > * it is the most commonly used style, both in KDE and in The Other > > GUI. > > Sorry, this argument doesn't hold any water with me. We should have a good > solution, not necessarily one that is (erroneously) widely used. This is of course a detail that is almost silly to debate :-), but in general I'd say that the decision is not so easy: usability does not exist in a vacuum, rather what makes something easy to use is the right balance between "inherent" good usability, and conformance to legacy "standards". I'd willingly agree that in this case, the question of previous use is not so important, as this is actually more a question of aesthetics than usability (the difference in reading speed is neglectable) and what's a reasonable style guide for programmers to be able to live up to. /Magnus