[Ubuntu-manual] top bar, menu bar, panel or top panel
Phil Bull
philbull at gmail.com
Thu Jul 12 09:58:24 UTC 2012
Hi all,
On Thu 12 Jul 2012 10:12:30 BST, Paddy Landau wrote:
>> > Additionally, per the GNOME docs style guide, menubar should be one
>> word, not two
>
>
> "Menubar" as one word is really ugly. :-( I'm not sure that we should
> be mangling English.
>
> Are we perhaps looking in the wrong places? Surely there is someone or
> some team who decides the standards within Canonical, and we should
> ask that person or team?
I'm one of the people who worked on setting terminology for the
upstream GNOME documentation. The GNOME docs style guide you're using
is probably outdated (we need to update it - that sounds like a
recommendation for GNOME 2.x).
When choosing terminology, we try to use terms that are (in decreasing
order of approximate importance):
(1) Wholly unambiguous
(2) Easy to understand
(3) Validated by user testing
(4) Non-technical (not jargon)
(5) Concise
(6) Consistent with ingrained terminology
It's not always possible to fulfil all these criteria, but you can
normally hit the first three at least. Once a term has been chosen, the
next important step is to use it consistently everywhere (docs and
software).
The term that we use in GNOME is "top bar", which matches (1)-(5). And
yes - for (3), we actually tested this term on real users.
In my experience, this sort of discussion goes round in circles, and
no-one ever makes a decision because no-one feels they have the
authority. That being the case, I humbly suggest that you defer to the
upstream GNOME recommendation, "top bar", as justified above. Does
anyone have any objections to that?
Thanks,
Phil
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