Re: UI design [was Owen Taylor's paper]

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On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 09:32:50PM +0000,  Angles  Puglisi wrote:
> Couldn't I "patch" and recompile some widget libraries so the "yes/no" buttons
> appear in the same order that I desire?
Short answer: no.

Long answer: Thought experiment:

In GNOME (at least 1) not very easily, but sort of doable by overriding
GnomeDialog. Applications supply button names in some order and when
a button is pressed, they get a number corresponding to position of
the button in the order (i.e. "Help", "Cancel", "OK"; then Help is
0, Cancel is 1, OK is 2.
So you could in theory have a list of "special cases" that you reorder,
but as soon as the buttons are named differently (the names passed are
either "stock" buttons which include the theme icon, or an ordinary word
which is *already translated to the UI language*) and/or there is an
additional button, this would probably break, leading to GNOME in which
some dialogs are Cancel/OK, some OK/Cancel.

KDE is a bit easier, KDialogBase get supplied a set of standard
buttons (Yes, No, OK, Cancel, Try, Help, ...) and places them according
to the KDE standard, and returns generic ID of the button (Qt::Ok).
Here it would be probably quite easy to change.

The trouble is that by doing this we have covered only the standard
dialogs that are created using these classes. It will break as soon
as we:
* need to name the buttons slightly differently (Yes, I want to register
  vs. No, I promise to register tomorrow)
* use hand-crafted dialogs instead of using standard classes (which is
  sometimes inevitable)
* want to make a "lean and mean" GTK-only or portable commercial-Qt-only
  application
* use an UI builder such as Qt Designer that doesn't use KDialogBase either
  (yet?)
* have other special demands (i. e. voice tutorial for blind users:
  Now press Tab to get to the "No" button - err.. If it's RHL, press Tab
  twice)
* want to take screenshots

Yes, this can be solved by implementing an "order switch" in each toolkit
and pushing all projects to respect it (including the projects that are
no longer maintained ;-), but I'd personally much prefer just sticking to
one style, and frankly, GNOME 2 is the one who has broken traditions here.
	Mirek



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