Re: To dialog or not to dialog, etc.

[David Marcus & Peggy Lamberson <zorro -at- NETDEPOT -dot- COM>]

In email on Tue, 9 Apr 1996 10:04:04 -0500, Janet S. Myers wrote:

| In the same area, I'm seeking opinions, which I sure some of you have, on
| what do you call the smallest part of a table layout in a window?

| Coming from a data base background, when I'm refering to a particular one
| in a row, I call it a field.  Most of the developers I work with now think
| of the tables as spreadsheets and call them cells.  Somewhere along the
| line I started referring to rows rather than records, but can't remember
| when. I also refer to a collection of fields/cells as a column. In Windows,
| is anything a field?

Janet,

I don't think that this is a question of Windows vs. other environemnts--it
is a SQL database vs. flat-file database difference. SQL vendors use
colum/row, which seems to be steadily usurping the older field/record
terminology.

A cell is a specific column in a specific row as displayed in a
two-dimensional spereadsheet-like grid. When you are speaking more
generally, for instance saying "The 'To' column must contain an address", I
recommend column instead of cell even in the above context. If the data is
not displayed in a grid, I use column instead of cell.

I'm not sure that any of this is a hard or fast rule, but I hope it helps.

David Marcus
Documentation Manager
IQ Software Corporation