menubar section of KDE's HIG needs rethinking

[Duncan]

Jakob Lehmann posted on Sun, 23 May 2010 16:17:28 -0600 as excerpted:

> The KDE Human Interface Guideline (HIG) declare, that a menubar is
> mandatory for every single application, quotes:
> 
> "Provide a menubar in every application main window"
> "Don't make the menubar 'hideable', users may not easily be able to
> make the menubar viewable again"

[I didn't read the entire post, just quick-skimmed it.  I'll leave it 
marked unread to come back to and read in depth later.  So this isn't a 
detailed response.  If I feel the need after the later full read, I'll 
respond in more depth then.]

FWIW, one of the IMO /good/ things about KDE is that it takes a reasonably 
sane stance toward its HIG.  After all, the G is /"Guideline"/, and unlike 
some projects, that's exactly what KDE treats it as, a /guideline/, not 
some set of "Thou shalt" commandments from on $DEITY.  Individual app devs 
have always been free to do other things with their app.  I believe for 
apps that ship as part of KDE SC, they need to provide some sort of 
reasoning behind it, but of course, KDE is now even more strongly 
encouraging independent devs to build on its technology, and being just 
that, independent, they are free to develop their app as they see fit, 
entirely ignoring the HIG if so desired.

That said, I'd certainly disagree with "Don't make the menubar hidable".  
In fact, I'd set it up so the menubar widget provided in kdelibs provides 
that service on its own, so devs have to actively disable that support in 
ordered to prevent it being hidable.  Similarly with tear-off menus.  
Support should be built-in, and devs should have to go some way to 
deliberately disable it if they're using KDE's widgets, if they for 
whatever reason don't like the feature.

Keyboard shortcuts and shortcut remapping should work similarly, and I 
think they actually do, to some extent.  One of my frustrations is with 
apps that don't fully map their functionality to the shortcut config 
wizard, as I'm constantly coming across functions that I want to map 
shortcuts to, that simply aren't listed, so I can't.  (I've not looked at 
what the HIG says for these.)

So obviously I agree, the HIG needs updated, but fortunately, things 
aren't as bad as they might be, because unlike some projects, KDE does 
tend to have a reasonably sane attitude about its HIG, treating the /
guidelines/ as exactly that.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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