As someone who has worked in an industry where warnings, cautions and notes are important, here is the definitions that were used:
WARNING - there is a risk of personal injury or death should you not follow instructions correctly and with great diligence. CAUTION - there is a risk of physical damage to equipment if instructions are not followed correctly and in the correct order. NOTE - to bring to attention that something may happen when carrying out instructions if the instructions are not carried out in the correct order. Obviously these definitions do not really apply to software, but it is something worth thinking about when creating warnings, cautions or notes. As you can see for notes, the word "attention" is used in the definition because that is what note should be used for. It should not be used as a replacement for caution. In my opinion, caution just makes into its definition because you do something wrong in software, you can break the software. After all, software could be classified as equipment. Regards Peter Schofield [email protected] On 31 Dec 2012, at 06:06, Gary Schnabl wrote: > On 12/30/2012 5:51 PM, Jean Weber wrote: >> On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Tom Davies<[email protected]> wrote: >>> I don't have a clue about the rules or guidelines but as a native-English >>> speaker ... >>> 1. i agree that "Caution" is less alarming than "Attention" >>> 2. If something doesn't quite match all the criteria required in an >>> "Attention" notice then "Caution" is a good fall-back. >>> >>> I'm not sure if there is any logical reason for "Attention" being more >>> alarming. It seems more militaristic (if that is really a word) whereas >>> "Caution" is somehow softer and friendlier. That could just be my own >>> opinion though because i can't think of a logical reason. >> I don't find "Attention" to be alarming at all and in fact to me it's >> fairly equivalent to Caution, which I don't find any friendlier. >> >> So Tom, it's either a cultural (British vs USAmerican or Australian) >> word-association thing, or just you. :-) >> >> --Jean >> > > Agreed. Warning is more foreboding than caution--at least when regarding harm > to personnel (instead of damage to equipment...) in US English. > > Back in the day, DocBook XML publishing of software documentation used the > term caution differently than warning. Confer: > caution, http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/caution.html > and warning, http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/warning.html > > BTW, OO and LO documentation used only three of those four DocBook terms > (tip, note, caution, and warning)--by not using warning. > > Gary > > -- > Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] > Problems? > http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ > Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette > List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ > All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted > -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
