This is a proposal for a slight redesign of the search dialog. It uses slightly
different wordings and a slightly different structure in some places.

The goals with this proposal was to make translations in multiple languages
easier, and to form natural human language sentences.



------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2000-12-20 17:35:18 ----

Created an attachment (id=1093)
Search dialog proposal draft 1.0




------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-20 17:42:04 ----

Doing this proposal might be an alternative way to fix bug 45245.



------- Additional Comments From arlo@workthatmouse.com 2000-12-20 18:27:54 ----

This change doesn't really call out what *has* been changed.

Is it just wording, or something greater?



------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2000-12-20 19:41:10 ----

This attachment is what the existing dialog is like.

The changes are for building a better sentences and improving the ability for
proper localization. The sentence in the proposal starts with "Search for
items", that will form the beginning of a sentence, instead of "Search For:".
"Name" is then, in the proposal, changed to "where the name". This helps
localization in that it makes clear that it is "name" in distinct form, and is
also thereby a solution to bug 45245. It also is a continuation of the "Search
for items" beginning. The same goes for the other "Content", "Type", "Size" and
"Owner", they are similar to "Name" in this aspect.

"matches glob" is changed to "matches the glob".
"matches regexp" is changed to "matches the regular expression".
Languages like Swedish do need the distinct form.

The "is" and "is not" have been concatenated with their preceding subject in the
sentence. Part of the reason is that there has to be a "that are modified" and
"that are not modified" anyway in this field, because of the word order. So
"where the type is" and "where the type is not" and the rest could also be
written in a similar way. It also makes translation easier; more complete
messages are almost always easier to translate.

"regular file" is changed to "a regular file".
"text file" is changed to "a text file".
"application" is changed to "an application".
"folder" is changed to "a folder."
The reason is that I *think* that saying "the type is a text file" is better
than saying "the type is text file". I could very well be wrong though. You
can't, however, say "the type is a music", so "music" is unchanged.

"smaller than" was changed to "less than". That was an error in my proposal,
though. Either both "more than" and "less than", or "larger than" and "smaller
than". I propose the "more than" and "less than"; "the size is less than" sounds
better, I think.

I think that it is not the emblem that is marked with something, it is the item
that is marked with an emblem. This led me to the "With emblem" "marked with" ->
"where the emblem is" change.

Finally, the "Last modified" -> "that are modified" change was in an attempt to
also make it part of the "Search for items" sentence, and on the same time make
it suited translation.




------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2000-12-20 19:43:49 ----

Created an attachment (id=1094)
Existing search layout




------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2000-12-20 19:45:04 ----

Created an attachment (id=1095)
Diff between the two files




------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2000-12-20 19:51:41 ----

Also, the approach of writing the search criteria like a sentence makes it
possible to re-use these messages in the search results (a solution to bug
45315). All that is needed is changing the initial "Search for items" to "Items".

Eaxample: The search results for a search like

"Search for items" "where the content" "includes all of" [corals sea shells]

could be displayed as

"Items" "where the content" "includes all of" [corals sea shells]

because it is already a sentence.




------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-21 11:00:14 ----

Doing what's suggested in this bug report might be a good way to address bug
45245. Setting the priority lower on this bug does not mean that I favor one way
or another of addressing the underlying problem.



------- Additional Comments From rebecka@eazel.com 2001-03-06 11:44:50 ----

If we're going to "reword" and "clarify" there are a couple pet peeves I
have with the current ui.
It should be more grammatical, and we should have only one of "glob"
and "Regexp".  It's really unintuitive to use normal regular expressions
to search for file names, so I'd like to cut that feature.
Also, I'd like to clean up the content search. The options available are really
annoying and focused on the case where you are searching for several words,
which isn't the usual case.





------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:48 -------