On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 11:47:03AM +0100, Mike Newman wrote: > On 17 Apr 2001 11:22:30 +0100, colin z robertson wrote: > > > > True enough - is there perhaps a neutral term which translates well > > > which could strike a balance between the two? > > > > There's always "options". To my mind that doesn't have any > > connotations either way. > > I like "options" too, but this is really one for the i18n people to > think about perhaps? Well, except that we need an English word as well, and I think I'm qualified for that at least. Which raises the question, how does l10n work at the moment? I mean, here we are having a big discussion about quite subtle points of terminology. Is the same process going on with the translators? I took a brief look at the gnome-i18n-list archives the other day and got the impression that it was more likely to be just one person working alone on the translations. > > > I think that in terms of a UI guidelines documents, we ought perhaps to > > > be encouraging developers to separate the two sorts of configuration > > > questions - even if its into two distinct tabs within a PropertyBox. > > > > I'm not sure about this. In general one wants these things organised > > by subject. Organising by level of technicality would break this in a > > lot of cases. > > At first I agreed with you, but after looking at a few of the apps on my > desktop it's actually not far from being the norm - mainly by virtue of > the way hackers think/work perhaps. For example, looking at the > "Properties" box of the mailcheck applet one sees two tabs - one > primarily asking how the user wants the applet to do things, the other > asking for technical information about the mailbox. OK, the tabs aren't > labelled well as such, but this is a reasonable example. Ok, if it happens by default anyway then that's good. But if there were to be a situation in which it didn't happen by default then I think I'd be in favour of mixing them. After all, it's such a vague line (not really a line at all, in fact) between preferences and settings that separating them out would just make things harder to find. Often one person's preference is another person's setting. I know a lot of people who aren't techies who couldn't care less whether their mail client sends html formatted mail or plain text, as long as the person at the other end can read it. To them, that's a setting. I'm a techie, and I believe that html formatted mail is technically the wrong thing. I personally have a preference for plain text. To give another example, Sawfish has the option to automatically reload themes when they are modified. I'm really not sure whether this is a setting or a preference, but the place I would expect to find it is with all the other theme configuration stuff. I wouldn't want to have to look there and then possibly in an "advanced" tab to find it. (As it happens, it's under "miscellaneous", which is perhaps even worse.) The upshot of all of this is that I'm in favour of "options", covering all levels of technicality. colin _____________________________ ____ rtnl http://rational.cjb.net c z robertson ndirect co uk icq 13294163
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