On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 18:57 +0100, Calum Benson wrote: > On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 02:24 +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: > > > > Perhaps it should be updated with something along the lines of > the > > > above? > > > ... > > > > Agreed. I'll submit a patch unless Calum gets there first. :-) > > Go for it :) The current "no explanatory text" guideline was written > by > the Sun docs folks for various reasons, when they were the major docs > contributors-- not least, I suspect, to avoid opening the floodgates > to > a rush of additional 'help' text written by folks of lesser > documentation adroitness than themselves, much of which they would > have > felt obliged to review and edit. Which is fair enough, up to a > point-- > nothing can turn a neat interface into a sloppy one more quickly than > a > dose of bad prose.
This is one reason (the other being translatability) that I think we should have regular string reviews by people whom we can trust to do them well. I have no idea how we'd manage to coordinate them, but it would have a drastic impact on our interfaces. Even without additional blocks of explanatory text, we have plenty of very awkward strings in a number of our applications. Some of them are just outright wrong, while others are just stylisticly weird. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
