Jan Schenkel wrote: > Maybe it's because they were accountants *grin* but > progressive disclosure isn't always the answer.
In all fairness to progressive disclosure, it isn't merely a case of showing and hiding controls necessarily, but in the larger view guides where those controls are placed to begin with. For example, Photoshop (and sadly, most other programs since) have decided that having every possible feature in front of the user is a good thing, but the resulting migration from to dialogs to palettes has not reduced the number of steps needed to perform most tasks, in some cases making tasks harder because of the smaller target area of palette controls and the lack of a universal way to shift keyboard focus from the document window to a palette. Moreover, reliance on palettes often results in a lot of visual noise and consumes precious screen real estate that distracts from the user's document. In the case at hand, where the question about showing/hiding controls comes in, we need to balance that with another cardinal principle: consistency. Both MS and Apple HIGs suggest that having a consistent menu bar with items that enable/disable depending on context is generally better than one in which the menu bar is constantly changing with the context. The MS HIG goes further to suggest that the same principle applies to controls, and I tend to agree for the reasons you cited, noting only that this does not necessarily conflict with progressive disclosure. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
