Re: "Correct" Windows, KDE button order? (was: Re: alternative button order: Why don't we auto-guess the alternative order by default if appropriate?)

[Celeste Lyn Paul <celeste kde org>]

I'm missing part of the conversation, but is this  Portland Project 
discussion?

I know KDE and Gnome do it differently (OK/Cancel, Cancel/OK) for their 
respective reasons (ie, afaik they didnt just make it up and it didnt just 
happen that way).  The same for the position of Help, Defaults, Apply, etc.

Is there a standard published on FreeDesktop about this?  That is the place 
where, once a decision is made, it should be published.  However, I do not 
think it is necessary for either Gnome and KDE to change the order they 
display buttons, those are differences in the environments they have chosen 
to make.

Also, the KDE documentation cited is from 2.0, we're currently working on 4.0 
and 3.0 is much more relevant.  I don't forsee the button order changing, 
only maybe the alignment and orientation in certain circumstances.

The KDE 4 HIG draft has been relocated, however there isn't much content (only 
one person working on it atm).

~ C

On Friday 05 January 2007 10:13, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 05.01.2007, 14:51 +0100 schrieb Sven Neumann:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 14:25 +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> > > I'm mainly asking because in 99% of the cases one wants the alternative
> > > order to be reverse from the original order
> >
> > I haven't found a definitive source for this, but as far as I know, your
> > assumption breaks as soon as a third button is added. Then the typical
> > alternative order is not the reverse of the original one. See this
> > example:
> >
> >  standard:     [Reset] [Cancel] [OK]
> >  alternative:  [Reset] [OK] [Cancel]
> >
> > I might be totally wrong here, but that's how we are arranging the
> > buttons based on feedback from Windows users.
>
> I must admit that I also have no clue what the correct order is.
>
> I consulted MSDN but I couldn't find any interesting/relevant documents
> listing non-standard buttons, except some OK/Cancel/Apply examples [1].
>
> Unfortunately, KDE seems to have yet another policy according to their
> developer pages [2]. It is not really a policy, but a traditional order:
>
>   Help,Default,User3,User2,User1,Ok,Apply|Try,Cancel|Close
>
> i.e. we would have OK/Apply/Cancel, which is totally inconsistent with
> Windows. The KDE 3 HIG [3] doesn't even seem to mention button order and
> just gives some samples that match the pattern noted above.
>
> The current drafts of the KDE 4 guidelines [4] ("current" according to
> the KDE usability/HIG project [5]) seem to be offline so I don't know
> what the current drafts propose for KDE 4.
>
> I've CCed the KDE [6] and GNOME [7] usability lists to get some more
> feedback on this. I'm aware that this is an ugly cross-posting, sorry.
>
>
> So it looks like we should be able to adapt to the major desktop
> environments. Regarding the implementation of this in GTK+, we could do
> the following:
>
> We might eventually end up with optionally keeping around a whitelist of
> buttons to put on the very right and the very left in very a specific
> order, which we might store as an XSetting or widget style.
>
> Yes/No dialogs, or other dialogs that don't have exclusively buttons on
> the whitelists could be dealt with by additionally reversing the
> remaining buttons iff "gtk-alternative-button" is present.
>
> In general, in case of two options, the cancellation button seems to be
> located on the right of the confirmation button for both KDE and
> Windows, and on the left of the confirmation button for GNOME, and if
> this is correctly specified in the whitelists it should work for the
> common cases at least.
>
> Proposed KDE whitelist (left): Help,Default,Revert
> Proposed KDE whitelist (right): Ok,Apply,Cancel,Close
>
> Proposed Windows whitelist (left): Help,Default,Revert
> Proposed Windows whitelist (right): Ok,Cancel,Close,Apply
>
> Note that Help would always be left-aligned while Default and Revert
> would just be displayed on the left of user-added buttons.
>
> Other buttons would go to the center, with the button order "swapped" in
> KDE/Windows, i.e.
>   [ No ] [ Yes ] (GNOME)
> would be displayed as
>   [ Yes ] [ No ]  (KDE, Windows)
> and other odd setups like
>   [ Cancel] [ No ] [ Yes ] (GNOME)
> would be displayed as
>   [ Yes ] [ No ] [ Cancel ] (KDE, Windows)
>
> [1] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms673346.aspx
> [2]
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/books/kde-2.0-development/ch08lev1se
>c5.html [3]
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/dialogs/index.ht
>ml [4] http://www.kde.org/areas/guidelines/html/
> [5] http://openusability.org/projects/kde-hig/
> [6] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability
> [7] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability

-- 
Celeste Lyn Paul
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org