[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Ellipsis

[Heiko Tietze]

On Friday 10 January 2014, 17:01:39 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> I'm not sure how we should decide here. On the one hand, when you click the
> menu entry, indeed nothing happens other than a dialog opening. On the other
> hand, this is all that the menu entry does: It doesn't perform an action
> for which further input is needed, but instead opening the dialog _is_ its
> action.
Even if we change it for this particular item there is still need for a good 
definition. When I inspect kmail's configure menu it's a lot of 'ellipsis 
noise'.

Usually, the difference between 'Print...' and 'Print Preview' or 'Save...' and 
'Save as...' is used to teach people what ellipsis mean: it's a special 
indicator for the user, meaning 'You are safe to proceed because the next 
dialog provides another confirmation'. I believe it's not good to overstress 
the usage of ellipsis beyond this because the indicator becomes useless 
thereby.
As discussed yesterday, I believe confirmation dialogs should always be modal, 
so the mode could be a good criteria when ellipsis are usefull. The other 
option is to define a fix list of menu items with ellipsis and to advice to not 
use it anywhere else (except of truncated control labels, of course).