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[lmi] Ellipses in menus


From: Greg Chicares
Subject: [lmi] Ellipses in menus
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2015 13:59:48 +0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Icedove/31.3.0

I'm thinking of removing the ellipsis for
  Help | About
because its dialog is not meaningfully interactive,

and adding ellipses for
  File | Default...
  File | Preferences...
because theirs are.

The first change seems to be a canonical best practice.
As for the other two, I'm persuaded by the last two
paragraphs here, viz.:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/637683/when-to-use-ellipsis-after-menu-items#2697372
| You can argue for both conventions for both these actions. You can't
| actually change any properties or options without doing some extra
| actions in the dialog that is displayed which assumes that ellipsis
| should be used. However you might just be interested in viewing what
| options or properties that are defined and that would assume that no
| ellipsis is used. Microsoft also acknowledge that there are instances
| when there is ambiguity
|
| "In case of ambiguity (for example, the command label lacks a verb),
| decide based on the most likely user action. If simply viewing the
| window is a common action, don't use an ellipsis." However based on
| this it would make more sense to have ellipsis for Options and
| Properties as it is probably more likely that you want to change a
| property that just view it.

Think of these as
  File | Modify default...
  File | Change preferences...
because end users rarely if ever treat them as
  File | Examine default...
  File | View preferences...

I'll entertain objections for twenty-four hours.



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