red/yellow/blue buttons an anachronism?

Robb Shecter shecter at darmstadt.gmd.de
Fri Oct 1 15:22:02 UTC 1999


Michael Klein wrote:
> 
> The names of the buttons should be semantic, not color or positional.
> 

This sounds reasonable to me too - but I'm in no way a Smalltalk
expert.  The discussion makes me wonder; does it really happen that
you must tell the user about RYB buttons on the mouse?  That sounds
really low-level and dependent on one particular input method.  I
think that the "mapping" that Mac users must do to convert "yellow
button" to "some key + button" is a clue that there's a problem.

How do other systems handle this?  I haven't thought about this too
much, so I'm winging it here - I might be completely wrong:

* I've seen docs in some Windows programs that say something like
"Select the text...".  This sounds good - a user is told to perform a
higher-level action, not "Press the [left/second/blue] mouse
button...".

* For showing popup/context-sensitive menu's, MouseEvents in Java have
a method "isPopupTrigger" that hides the details of the particular
platform's interaction style.  This sounds good to me too - Like in
the first case, the program docs can just rely on the user knowing how
to use their own computer, and don't have to specify (become dependent
on) low-level input mechanisms.

Can this approach be substituted for RYB buttons?

 - Robb





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