GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 132570
[UI-REVIEW] Use separators or plain spacing instead of frames
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The HIG says[1] that "[u]sing "white" or blank spacing and indentation to delineate groups is cleaner and preferable to using graphical separators such as frames." The current heavy use of frames does not only make the interface of gcalctool appear unnecessarily "heavy" but also makes it look different from other GNOME apps because most other apps tend to avoid frames in recent times and therefore have a cleaner interface. Below I'll attach a patch to change the gcalctool interface to use spacing only to indicate widget grouping instead of frames. The patch also changes the widget-padding of 4 pixels for each button to a more HIG-compliant 6 pixels between each column/row, 6 pixels to the window border and 12 pixels between the individual control groups. An alternative patch additionally uses Gtk-separators to separate the groups. This patch might be used if spacing-only is considered to light. I think that using separators is still a big improvment when compared to the current use of frames. However, personally at least I slightly prefer the spacing-only setup. Finally there's also one screenshot for each setup so that there's an easy way to see what the results of the patches will look like. Regards and thanks for your work on this application, Lars [1] See the 8th bullet-item at the following location: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/layout.html#window-layout-spacing
Created attachment 23768 [details] [review] Use spacing for widget grouping instead of frames
Created attachment 23769 [details] [review] Use separators instead of frames for widget grouping
Created attachment 23770 [details] Screenshot of gcalctool using spacing instead of frames
Created attachment 23771 [details] Screenshot of gcalctool using separators instead of frames
Adding Calum, my HIG person for his comments on this.
Spacing-only version gets my vote, looks less cluttered to me.
I believe a consensus was reached on irc.gnome.org in the #usability channel for the spacing instead of the separators. Even though separators were my first love... *sigh* ;-) Spacing gets my vote too.
Changes checked into CVS HEAD (the spacing approach). Fixed in v4.3.41 of gcalctool. Thanks to Calum and Bryan for their reviews. Thanks to Lars for doing all of the hard coding work!
This 'fix' broke high-contrast theming, since the frame borders are used to delineate between objects which in HC themes have no bevels, etc. and which may have the same bg color.
spacing is bad for high-contrast themes. Why wasn't the a11y group pulled into this discussion, I wonder?
Because the a11y group have never complained that spacing is bad for high contrast themes before :) AFAIK the calctool incident is the first time this advice (which has been employed in GNOME for a good couple of years now) has caused any visual issues serious enough to reconsider. So, I guess we (the HIG and a11y teams) need to discuss what the general solution is here... perhaps that windows should be designed with borderless frames to separate groups (which isn't generally the case right now), and that the HC engine should show them as non-borderless? I dunno, I'll open another bug about that and we can move discussion there.
Opened bug 142720 for that discussion.