| From: | |
| Date: | 27 Feb 2001 at 23:58:24 |
| Subject: | Ellipsis notation with interactive commands (style-guide issue) |
Dear list, let me once again go a little bit off topic,
According to a book I read, the convention about placing three dots
after interactive commands (e.g. "Save as...") originates from Apples
Lisa and was later adopted by the Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft
Windows and Motif.
However, according to this book they should only be used when the dialog
box following the command issued needs additional info from the user
(thus can also be aborted).
So it would be wrong to have a menu item named "About..." or "New
window...", since these do not require additional info from the user.
I don't have the Amiga style-guide, so I cannot check if C= modified the
convention when they adopted it. If not then we sure have a lot of
programs which violate it... I just looked at Workbench and here we have
"About...", "New drawer" and "Information..." which are all wrong
according to the original convention. Actually, even if C= did modify
the convention to say "commands opening additional windows" then
Workbench still violate it...
Any comments?
Kind regards Allan
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