[perhaps OT and already discussed] usability standard/recommendation/guildline?

[Lauri Watts]

On Wednesday 13 October 2004 15.17, Jono Bacon wrote:
> Zhang Weiwu wrote:
> > Hello. I happen to see this comment and table from scribus mailing
> > list. I wonder isn't there a good usability standard or recommendation
> > released from standard group like freedesktop, rather than from one or
> > two single persons about one or two single usability problems? Sorry
> > for wrong post, perhaps I am OT becuase this group is for standard
> > creation not ideas?
>
> It is defficult to define usability on a cross desktop basis. This is
> simply because each desktop is defining different usability constructs
> for their respective applications. As an example, the GNOME and KDE ways
> of doing things are different because they have different ideals in
> where the project should. I think there is a potential for some
> collaboration between the two environments in some parts of usability
> (such as button ordering in a dialog box), but this can only be applied
> if there is no strong usability goal for that portion of the desktop.
>
> I would be interested to see if there are any potential collaborative
> measures we could take with freedesktop.org and determine how much buy
> in KDE, GNOME, Qt, GTK, wxwindows and other software would get. Any
> thoughts?

I guess everyone who knows about it is tiptoeing around this one, but fools 
rush in and all that.

We tried this once before actually, and it was a dismal failure (ie, nothing 
actually got done at all.)  There's a dead mailing list around here somewhere 
too.  There certainly is potential for cross desktop agreement on general 
guidelines, in fact I did for a couple of years have on my website a merged 
copy of the KDE and GNOME style guidelines (where you could generate from a 
single docbook source the KDE content, the GNOME content, jointly agreeable 
content, and a "all the content" version.)  We largely (but not completely) 
agree on contents of menus, window behaviours, icons, wording styles, and 
many other things.  

Howerver: You could sort out the vi vs emacs, C vs C++, tabs vs spaces, 
creation vs evolution, and when you've done all that, spend a while proving 
humanoid life exists on other planets, before you will get KDE and GNOME to 
agree on button order in dialogs.  

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts, with her flame retardant suit on. 
KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org
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