Visual Guide to Widgets

[Alex Nordstrom]

On Friday, 17 Sep 2004 13:27, Hendrik wrote:
> On Friday 17 September 2004 00:59, Michael Pyne wrote:
> > On Thursday 16 September 2004 10:34 am, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
> > > Even more generally I have great trouble with the prepositions
> > > 'in' and 'on'. For example do you have buttons in the toolbar or
> > > on it? But this is a non-English-speaker problem...
> >
> > Both can be valid as I understand it.  If the toolbar is understood
> > to be a container, you would use "in".  (The ball is in the box)

I believe this is a way of thinking that might be too focused on 
implementation, where the toolbar encapsulates the toolbar buttons. I 
think non-technical users might not have this conceptual view of it. 
This is of course pure speculation based on `common sense'.

> I, non-native as well, tend towards "on". My computer science
> professor also says "on", so that should be fine as well.
> We really need an authority like Webster/Duden/Oxford to give us a
> unified guideline for all the tech-terms(spelling, adverbs, etc),
> especially in languages other than English.

Incidentally, Webster does define `toolbar' as `a strip of icons on a 
computer display providing quick access to certain functions'. I'm not 
a native speaker either, but honouring Webster's conceptualisation of 
what the toolbar is, it seems to me that it would make more sense to 
say that icons are on a strip than to say they are in a strip.

At the heart of this is the terrible word itself. Things like buttons 
and menus relate to real-world objects, and hence provide interaction 
congruent with their metaphorical nature. A toolbar has no such 
real-world mapping. While the options it presents may be thought of as 
tools with a reasonable degree of metaphorical accuracy, having a `bar' 
of tools is really quite nonsensical; it's mixing a metaphor with an 
abstract concept.

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://lx.n3.net/
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to kde-quality.