[kde-guidelines] HIG for list of pairs (details)

[Heiko Tietze]

Am 30.04.2014 15:03:57, schrieb Björn Balazs:
> How about the highlighting of different rows? That is more of a table feature, 
> but would help a lot here. Is it allowed / recommended / rejected?


Of course, alternating rows makes sense. The list views HIG [1] says: "Alternate row color (use theme settings)." But if you think about tables [2], I'd rather advice against it: "Do not use a table for read only purpose. In this case use a simple list view or a tree view with multiple columns." With the different appearance of list views and tables it should be intuitively clear whether or not an editing features is available.
> Also how about long keys or values - lists might quickly become unbalanced if 
> they are too long. How should we handle this?


At least for myself, I haven't thought about list (columns) with overlength. Should we cover this aspect in the HIG? Or do we point to the text guideline, but it does not fit well.
Personally, I'd follow the advice to allow resizing: "If the list appears in a dialog or utility window, consider making the 
window and the list within it resizeable so that the user can choose how
 many list items are visible at a time without scrolling." It was actually meant for vertical size but is good as well for the width. 

And here we come to a point that is interesting: How do we handle the width of multiple columns on resizing the list/table? First ideas: a) One (or the right-most) column gets all the remaining space, b) The proportion of column width is kept and all columns are adjusted to the new size, and c) Only those columns are resized proportional that not have been resized individually. And what happens if the user has resized a column in a way that it does not fit anymore (e.g. total size is 100px, col 1 has 70px and col2 has 50px). 
In my opinion the proportion works always bad and looks strange. So my preference is a), unless the user has touched it.

About your issue: I'd recommend to crop the text with ellipsis. Your alternative solution #3 uses line breaks which has impact on the total window height (I hope you don't want to add scrollbars). Imaging the evil neighbor who writes a roman in his SSID... :-)
[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/ListView
[2] http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/TableView

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