[398] in Athena User Interface
Re: Menu icons not working
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Sep 8 01:02:05 2000
Message-Id: <200009080502.BAA03954@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 01:02:01 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> An icon should mean something. If it is a representation for the
> program, then its absense should mean that the program is not there.
> An ugly broken icon would be semantically superior.
I think the meaning of the icons in the menus is generally interpreted
as graphical identifiers, not presence indicators. As in "the icons
help me find the program I'm looking for" rather than "the icon should
be there if the program is there."
I don't know what mechanism has been decided upon for indicating that
a program is not available on a given platform, but icon presence
certainly shouldn't be it.
> We are NOT obligated to put graphics and color everywhere we
> possibly can.
Agreed.
> The "splash of color" is tasteless and meaningless.
That sounds like an aesthetic judgement, so we would probably benefit
from some third and fourth opinions.
(Personally, I think that menus with no icons looks like the dull
text-oriented computing world of the 1960s, but you probably could
have guessed that.)
Also, they are on by default in Gnome, and are pictured in
documentation. Shouldn't we have a better justification for turning
them off than mere aesthetics?
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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