Re: fundamentals of the gnome user interface

["Andrew S. Townley" <atownley informix com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jan Gentsch <gentsch@ifm.uni-hamburg.de>
> Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 17:14:06 +0100
> To: gnome-gui-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: fundamentals of the gnome user interface
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> 1998
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> I am not sure whether a system of compliancy levels is a good  
idea. It seems
> to me that it would be better to just state the minimum standard  
of features
> a programm should have in order to consider itself to be gnome  
compliant. On
> top of that additional advise could be given, and of course gnome  
compliant
> programms should strive to follow this. I see no good reason to start 
> ranking
> a programm to be more compliant or less. What would that be  
usefull for?
> Either you do comply to a standard or you don't. Microsoft is very  
good at
> just being a bit compliant with standards, which renders things  
useless,
> because in fact they do not comply.
>
>
> Jan
>
>

Not that I'm disagreeing (and I'm certainly not trying to defend  
Microsoft), but I want to point out that the majority of the  
published UI guidelines (The Windows User Interface Guidelines or  
WIG) were created and published mainly to cover the Office 95 effort.  
 There wasn't a lot of consideration given to other types of  
applications both within and outside Microsoft when they didn't fit  
the Office 95 template.  Mainly, I think this points out that we want  
to make sure we don't make the same mistake and not give enough  
guidance in some of the other types of applications which may be  
created for GNOME.

Microsoft also has this lovely policy of publishing different and  
conflicting UI guidelines for different classes of their products  
with no clue as what should be done to resolve the discrepancies and  
still remain "UI compliant".  Add to this that so many of these other  
UI guidelines are difficult to locate, it is just setting the stage  
for some world-class screw-ups.

ast