On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 22:48 -0200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: [...] > Calum, can this be changed? I'd suggest: "When a group of controls is > arranged vertically, line up the left edges of the controls (or of the > first control in each horizontal subgroup), and right-align labels that > are placed to the left of the controls."
There was argument about this (as I recall), probably because a lot of Motif and Microsoft Windows programs left-aligned the labels. Left-aligned labels are great if you want to add them up :-) or they are sorted into alphabetical order and you want to scan through them like a phone book. Usually, though, you need to go through all the fields in any given region of a dialogue, in order. If not, the dialogue is probably badly designed, and should use grouping to let people find the area that is relevent, or a notepad widget with tabs, or simply not have so many options! The open look ui style guide was the first one that I saw to mandate "colon alignment", and the results were very effective. There are some good examples in the book by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano. I think this is a little off-topic... On the other hand, attention to graphic design, and to the understanding that the graphic design community has built up about how the human visual perception system works and how to communicate clearly can be very productive. Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
