On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, John Levon wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 08:28:23PM +0100, Angus Leeming wrote:
>
> > Bollocks. We have no mechanism yet in xforms for your fancy "what's this"
> > stuff. We had the debate some time ago about which route to take and the
> > consensual view was that these long descriptions were the way to go.
> >
> > The view at the time can be paraphrased as:
> > If I don't know what's going on, I'm grateful for a verbose description.
> > If I do know what's going on, then I can turn tooltips off.
> >
> > This still holds IMO. That may change of course if someone were to implement
> > a "what's this" thingumyjig.
>
> Now I understand the desire from Allan to turn tooltips off.
Not quite. I like the longer descriptions but once I know what thinsg
do I want to be able to turn them off. You might consider this a
semi-automatic "What's this" facilty but I personally hate the
"What's this" implementations I've ever experienced.
I will grant you that Juergen's descriptions could be more consise
without losing any of their meaning although:
[copied from John's earlier email]
Suggestions :
+
+ //set up the tooltip mechanism
+ string str = _("List of all opened documents. The labels from
the one you choose will be displayed in the browser. Useful if you are
working with multipart documents, where you might want to refer to
another doc.");
"Choose a document to show its labels"
This shorter suggestion is a bit confusing. Maybe:
"Show the labels of another opened document."
or something as terse and possibly still unenlightening (though more
accurate) as:
"Select a source for inter-document references."
We need to convey the purpose of *and* how to use the widget. Not
a simple task in a space and vocabulary restricted tooltip.
It would be nice to have an extra sentence warning of the need for the
two documents to be part of the same multi-part document so LaTeX
processing succeeds but then again we should be filtering the files
that are available in the list anyway shouldn't we?
> The net effect of long tooltips is probably to reduce usability, not
> increase it. But given xforms being xforms, it's an uphill battle to
> approach usability, so anything goes, really.
I don't think so. It's a matter of keeping clear, consise and correct
-- length by itself isn't a problem. Then the tooltips are at least
useful even if they do cover some of the other dialogs widgets (which
was why I prefer the dedicated dialog help area).
Allan. (ARRae)
