Re: "What's This?" in Describe submenu

[Kim F. Storm]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> Theoretically, yes.  But in practice, in my experimentation with this
> functionality on Windows, almost all places which are sensitive to the
> "What's This?" click are buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, and other
> widgets that perform some action, and it's that action that the
> popping tooltip describes.

Here is another example of "very different".

Suppose you have a pop-up in a Windoze application similar to
the M-x customize-face interface in Emacs.

Now, if a Windoze user clicks with the "What's this" mouse
cursor on the [109    ] input field:

     [x] Height: Value Menu Height in 1/10 pt: [109      ]

she would expect to get some form of explanation of what the value
entered into the "Height" field means.

Contrary, in Emacs, you simply get this (useless) information:

+---------------
| <down-mouse-1> at that spot runs the command mouse-drag-region
|    which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `mouse'.
| It is bound to <down-mouse-1>.
| (mouse-drag-region start-event)
|  
| Set the region to the text that the mouse is dragged over.
| Highlight the drag area as you move the mouse.
| This must be bound to a button-down mouse event.
|
| ... etc ...
+---------------

For every example you can find of "similarity" it seems that someone
else can find an example of "very different".

To me, it seems you are the only one defending "What's This", and IMHO
you are beating a dead horse.

Can't we just remove the "What's this" menu item and get on to some
more important business.

>
> So I still think your objections are generally valid for our doc
> strings, not specific to "What's This?".

Which doesn't make "What't This" any less deficient...

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk