Re: GNOME HIG and freedesktop.org spec. a bit contradicting??

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 20:00 -0700, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> I would go as far as to suggest moving an updated/modified Gnome
> HIG (v1.2+ and beyond) to freedesktop.org. This way, DEs that would
> want to follow the fd.org standards in general would also standardize
> on the HIG's look & feel and truly help to the creation of an
> omogenous unix desktop.

I disagree to this suggestion. There are plenty points to not have the
GNOME HIG become a general desktop standards of look & feel. One of them
is that the GNOME HIG is far from being perfect, ideal, optimal.

This doesn't mean that it is bad as a guideline itself but there are
people outside (including me) that believe that the HIG has a couple of
annoying issues that have been manifest as 'standards' for GNOME but
caused a lot of pain (one of the things are the ButtonOrder) which you
hear people complaining about ... and this complaint hasn't dropped
noise in the community and outside it since it has been adopted.

Another thing is that many different desktops also have different target
audience and a different general philosophy and they don't see how the
GNOME HIG would fit in there (I heard various talks about that on KDE
related pages and their developer irc channel) over the time. Which now
gets us to the last point. We know about the different philosophies,
communities and target audiences and own opinions of other users and
developers, you truly should avoid doing such a thing. A lot of people
decide on these things what desktop they want to use and we all agree
that people should still have a choice what to use and forcing the GNOME
HIG as a defacto standards which then may lead to adoption is removing
all choice from people. Say if someone selects his desktop simply and
alone for the fact that he can customize his desktop till death, that he
does like the Windows like ButtonOrder and the huge amount of
flexibility then you would cause a huge cut in their way of using the
desktop.

Nobody in the GNOME community has the right to enforce their sights to
other communities and people. But you have the right to bring up ideas
and have them discuss with other communities and be happy if you find an
agreement with them. This could also mean that you need to change
aspects in your HIG or have their ideas float into the HIG as well only
to get some sort of agreement.