Re: selectable labels

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> I'm guessing most people writing GTK apps would express their
> objection to this as "I don't want it to look like a text box, I want
> it to look like a label."

It's a valid enough objection, which could be avoided as I said by
having the textbox control include or not include its border at the
programmer's whim.  Although leaving UI decisions to a programmer's whim
can be dangerous sometimes  :o)
 
> i.e. if you have a text box with the white background and
> frame border, people try to type in it and realize they can't.

If it's non-editable, it shouldn't have the white background though, it
should have whatever colour is set up in the gtk theme for 'non-editable
fields'.  (If such a thing can be set in the gtk theme... if it can't,
it should be).

> Does that outweigh the keyboard navigation issue? I don't know.

Typical UI designer's answer to most questions: 'it depends'.  :o)  If
you're writing a noodly little game that people can download from your
website for a laugh, the answer is probably "yes, looking cool is more
important".  If you're hoping your application is going to be deployed
or used by anyone in the US government anytime soon, the answer is
almost certainly "no", because as of June 2001 they won't accept any
software that isn't fully keyboard accessible...

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

                Haud ma coat-- it's laldy time!