button ordering (was Re: fd.o HIG)

[Scott Wheeler]

On Monday 25 October 2004 20:45, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> GNOME isn't going to know how to move the buttons around.  Most the dialogs 
> are explicitly built with the buttons in a particular order.

Hmm.  That's unfortunate.

> What could be more confusing than app that behaves one way in one 
> situation(desktop) and differently in another situation?

I don't know, maybe say, having half of your applications using one button 
ordering and the other half using another?  ;-)

> It's entirely poor UI to have an application behave one way on one account 
> and a different way on another.

This isn't being pragmatic.  I mean -- it's entirely poor to have applications 
using multiple frameworks if we're going to be conceptual pedants, but we do, 
and this list is about trying to make things play nicely together.

Now, which is the more common case:  a user switches desktops regularly using 
the same set of applications or a user uses one desktop with applications 
from different toolkits?

I'll put my money on the latter, and I'd also go for optimizing for the common 
case, not the obscure one.

-Scott