Style Guide inconsistency
Matthew Phillips (473) 688 posts |
Page 53 of the latest edition of the Style Guide tells you how key presses in writable icons on dialogue boxes should behave. Up/down cursor, Shift-tab/tab move the caret to the previous/next icon, cycling round. Return should be equivalent to clicking the action button with a thick border. We’ve just realised that some of our applications did not conform to this because we had made the Return key only perform the default action if the caret was in the last writable icon in the dialogue box. The inconsistency of the subject of this topic is because at the foot of page 53 it says that the Wimp will handle caret placement automatically if the validation string is “Ktar” or similar. But while the “a” handles up/down cursor and “t” handles the tab, “r” makes the caret move to the next writable icon and suppresses the Wimp sending character 13 through as a keypress to the task, except when you are in the last writable icon in which case you will get a return keypress event. So if you have “Ktar” as your validation string, rather than “Kta” then you’ll not be following the Style Guide. The 1993 issue of the Style Guide does not give the validation string guidance on page 51, but in the “Implementing the design” chapter it says that writable icons should have a validation string of Ktar;Pptr_write but then two paragraphs further on reiterates the advice about Return not moving the caret to the next field! The latest edition has the identical text on page 109, so it is still giving the wrong advice about using Ktar rather than Kta. WinEd seems to default to Kta for new writable icons. I say “seems” because you can edit the icon palette yourself, and I cannot be certain I have not corrected it. I have modified our copy to add Pptr_menu for menu icons. Was there older guidance which favoured the Return key moving the caret to the next field? |
Bryan Hogan (339) 563 posts |
IIRC the original recommendation on RISC OS 2 was for Return to move to the next icon and that was how Draw, Paint, etc, did it. I think it must have been changed with the release of RO3. |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2113 posts |
That sounds about right – I think you’re looking at a holdover from the 1990 Guide. I thought I had a PDF of it somewhere but I can’t find it! Sorry to hijack the thread a little, but there’s another inconsistency that I’ve noticed (Feb 2015 issue). Page 35 says “Pressing either of F12 or Escape should return the user to the desktop” but page 72 says “F12: Give access to * Commands using the command line interface – do not use this key for anything else” and “Don’t allocate a different function to F12”. So on page 35 it’s saying that F12 should go to the desktop, and on 72 it says to always go to the CLI. I’m inclined to believe that the advice on page 35 takes precedence as it’s referring to full-screen apps, but page 72 basically says “no exceptions”. |