Re: Owen Taylor's paper

On Tuesday 17 September 2002 04:15, Nadim Bitar wrote:
>  From a UI stand of view there is no way you
> can unify KDE and GNOME they are 2 different environment and unifying
> them is plain stupid. It's like unifying Windows user interface and
> Apple's.

I used to reckon one of the great curses of computing was different keyboard 
layouts. I remember years ago I chose one keyboard over another simply 
because of the location of the "esc" key - someone, IBM I think, put it where 
one would use the right hand to press it. Other keys that tend to wander are 
| and \. More recently, I've found myself pressing "Print Screen" because it 
was located where "INS" should be.

Similarly, lack of uniformity of GUI design leads to wasted time making and 
recovering from errors. Totally different GUI designs can still have 
uniformity in basic design such as a menu bar with "File, "Edit, "Options, 
"Help" selections in a specified order.

As I write this I have composer windows open in Kmail and Ximian Evolution. 
Both are email clients and for the most-part provide equivalent 
functionality.

XE has "File Edit View Insert Format Security" on its menu bar.
K has "Message Edit View Options Attach Settings Help."

If they were both written to the same UI standards, would that impede their 
functionality? No. Would it help users change from one to the other/ Yes.

How about if the Office suite, all the web browsers and so on were written to 
the same standard? I imagine the standard would require some entries (file, 
Edit, Help) and others would be optional (format perhaps), but it would 
assert the order of those menu items that do appear. Similarly, rules would 
apply to the contents of certain menus.

Similarly, rules would apply to labels of buttons on dialogues (OK, but 
probably not Accept or Close), behaviour of dialogs and so on.

IBM implemented such a standard many years ago, it was called Common Usage 
Architecture (CUA), and applied across all IBM's platforms.

In (null) I find the order and labelling of buttons varies, and that's just in 
GNOME.



-- 


Cheers
John.

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