Re: Owen Taylor's paper

On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 16:54:51 -0500, you wrote:

>Gerald Henriksen wrote:
>> However unless both the Gnome and KDE projects suddenly make up and
>> become friends the reality of the Linux desktop is that it will
>> actually be 2 products, Linux/KDE and Linux/Gnome, because their UI
>> design is almost exactly opposite.
>
>How so? What is so different in the UI of GNOME and KDE?

Lets take a look at the respective standards for button layout for
dialog boxes:

For Gnome2 we get the following layout:

"Save changes to document before closing"

Close_Without_Saving   Cancel   Save

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/windows.html#common-dialogs

This is basically the same layout that Apple uses for MacOS.

For KDE we get the following:

"Do you want to save your changes or discard them?"

Save   Discard  Cancel

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/dialogs/simple.html

This is the same layout as used by Motif, Windows, and Java.

Another example would be KDE using Yes/No but Gnome2 would use
Cancel/OK.

In both cases the order of the buttons is reversed, KDE essentially
reading left to right whereas Gnome2 reads right to left.

>I still don't see where GNOME, 1 or 2, is "opposite" of
>anything. Can you point me to some papers/articles that
>discuss this in more detail?

Gnome 2 has a UI standard, Gnome 1 I don't think did officially but
they for the most part were similar to KDE/Windows.