Re(2): "Click on" or "click"

[Jan Henning <henning -at- r-l -dot- de>]

>And what is their justification for this decision?

I wouldn't know. But here are some guesses:

- The whole point of modern GUI interfaces is to emphasize immediacy. So
you use immediate verbs. Like you "press" a key on the keyboard or a
button (on a TV), you "click" the icon and not "on the icon".

- If you want to be really precise, you would have to say "position the
mouse pointer over the icon and click the mouse button" (yes, once we
wrote manuals like that, almost two decades ago). Saying "click on"
because the user does not 'really' click a GUI object is neither here nor
there.

- Apple may simply have _defined_ this as the correct terminology back
when they invented Macintosh. (Yes, the use of "click" as opposed "click
on" goes back at least to 1987 - when men were men, small furry animals
were small furry animals, and manuals were created with Word.)

But most importantly, the way it goes with language, it is more important
to have something that everybody agrees on than having something that is
'logically' right. So there is a lot to be said for following conventions
that both Apple and Microsoft agree on.

Likewise, it may be suboptimal to confuse readers by calling something
"clicking on" that everybody else calls simply "clicking" - even if you
can 'prove' that your way is better.

You may want to read the part of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines
about standards and the deviation thereof when you have apparently
superior solutions - they are applicable to language as well as software
development and design.

Regards
Jan Henning



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