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Subject:Re: FONT STANDARDS From:"Michael West" <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- com> To:techwr-l Date:Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:41:07 +1100
I wrote:
>>>>> Don't you think most users, once they've found that checkbox,
>>>>> would understand what it is for simply by reading the label?
Bill Swallow wrote:
> LOL! I used to work for a software company catering to the telecomm
> industry, and the stuff was written for the AS/400... good ol' text
> interfaces, too!
>
> Well, we had one beauty of a screen in one of those applications...
> It was blank, save for one unlabeled field in the middle of the
> screen. It took any type of character, and a string of any length,
> without error (only returned an error on a null entry, and yes I know
> that's an oxymoron). No one knew why it was there, but no one wanted
> to remove it.
>
> I think we documented around it by instructing people to type "X" in
> the field and pressing Enter... I can't remember for certain.
Sounds hilarious, but in the example given, the checkbox
has a label that says "Always create backup copies", and
the help text someone was proposing was "Creates backup copies."
My position is that that is not help at all, but just foolishness.
