On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 04:31, Scott Kitterman
<ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>I understand your position and i agree with most of it, too.
>While we surely share the same opinion on much of what has been discussed
>here, i am developing a mental model of how there can be a learnable,
>consistent and semantically correct symmetry between command line interface
>and graphical user interface..
>
>The foundation of my unborn brainchild is that a dialog is a dialog, whether
>in a GUI or in the CLI.. perhaps i'm going too far with my thinking
Agreed.
Dialogue needs to work in the context it's presented.
Dialogue aka conversation consists of metaphors, which can be expressed and read through various carriers, e.g.
* text
* symbolic icons
* color (green vs red, saturated vs unsaturated etc)
* sound
* movement (vibration on mobile devices)
Text is one
way to deliver the content of a message. If the text is well designed in its semantic
root, it doesn't really matter what other carrier we translate it to, since
the translation will always relay the intended message correctly in its
respective context..
Part of the context is that provided by the user. Part of it is the visual context.
My bad, i was comparing father and son, apt and update-manager.
I should have suggested a text based symbolic dialog mapping of update-manager, instead of fumbling with its parent, which it extends.
So because the target CLI user is somewhat different than the target GUI user and because the presentation and interaction are also different it's quite reasonable we would want different text.