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Dialog boxes are pretty simple creatures. They have some text and some
buttons. Sometimes the text asks you to make a decision, and press
different buttons based on your decision. Sometimes the labels on the
buttons bear *no* resemblance to the actions they perform.
I'm not talking about buttons that outright lie; fortunately, they're
pretty rare. But in Windows, it's very easy to create dialog boxes with
"standard" buttons, like "Yes", "No", "OK", and "Cancel". This leads to
error messages like "The program has died unexpectedly. Press OK to quit
and Cancel to debug." Oh, yes, "Cancel" is so much like "debug" in
meaning. Thanks, Microsoft. (Yes, this was a Windows 2000 error.)
Why can't more people take a page from Apple's HCI guidelines, which
specify that button labels should be verbs? "Quit" and "Debug" would make
so much more sense than "OK" and "Cancel".
--
...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/
PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2
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If you want to eat hippopotamus, you've got to pay the freight.
-- attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software
uses so much memory
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