On 12 Aug 2008, at 16:04, Shaun McCance wrote:
Actually, the HIG contains this very unfortunate recommendation: Left-align components and labels, unless all the labels in a group have very different lengths. If they do, right-align the labels instead, to ensure that no controls end up too far away from their corresponding labels. This is very internationalization-unfriendly advice, since labels might be wildly different lengths in different languages, yet the alignment will be set based solely on the lengths in English.
A perfect example of design by committee, unfortunately. IIRC, some of us were arguing for left-alignment, and some of us were arguing for right-alignment, and we ended up just giving the classic UI designer's advice: "It depends".
(Which is perfectly valid advice as it's very often true, but unless you can usefully state what it depends on and why, it obviously doesn't make for a good guideline.)
Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
