On Sat, 25 Sep 2004, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 21:18:19 -0300 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape ML inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] idea: "temporary ungroup"
I'm pretty sure the Gnome Guidelines prohibit or at least discourage the use of markup in the status bar.
I know. A really stupid limitation IMHO.
While I am unsure of the reasoning behind it I would not dismiss it so quickly. I figure it is overkill and possibly distracting to have markup in the status bar messages (but I suppose if it was distracting I would have noticed it already).
The idea is simple:
- Inkscape is a complex app.
Agreed
- To make a complex app easy to learn, you need to provide a lot of
tips and explanations
Agreed
along the way, some of which may be quite longish.
probably
- To make longish tips readable, you need to highlight the important
bits. That's all.
I'm not convinced about the need for markup that's all, due in no small part to the fact that some one went to the trouble of writing the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines to specifically tell developers not to do it.
I will try and find out the reason for it but I already doubt there are any brilliant reasons against it, or even any good enough to convince you not to do it.
I suppose only by trying it will the pitfalls be (re)discovered.
Did you find out the reasoning behind it before going to all that trouble? using non-standard widgets could come back to bite you in the ass.
gtk-label is very standard. gtk-statusbar uses it internally anyway. And we don't need gtk-statusbar for its message stack because it's too primitive for our purposes (we have our own MessageStack and MessageContexts).
okay, so that is a non issue.
Presumably progress has been made in the past few years and markup no longer messes up translation as badly as it used to but it will at least mean extra effort for translators.
It will. So what? Do you suggest we should stop making our messages better for fear of giving translators extra work?
As far as a I remember the markup makes it harder for some of the gettext systems to recognises similar strings that can be reused. It also adds the extra task of deciding where to put the markup.
Translation is difficult and fairly thanksless work and having tried doing it myself I do not think making it any more difficult is a good idea and I commend the hard work of those who produce the translations. Maybe the translators enjoy their work so much that they wont mind and I suppsoe those that do can use their discretion and simply skip it.
(where this makes sense, of course).
for the benefit of translators when does it make sense and what rules or pattern should they try and follow?
Three main rules:
- Highlight the changing portion of the message, e.g.:
- In tips and error messages, highlight the most important part of
the message so that the highlighted part makes at least some sense when read separately, e.g.:
- In tips about keys and mouse, highlight the keys and shortcuts:
Rather, it's used as an "excuse" to improve things. If something is broken, I won't explain this in the statusbar; instead I'll have to fix it first and then describe the correct behavior.
Like I said earlier only by trying it will the pitfalls be discovered.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org