ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Phil Bull <philbull@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

On Thu 12 Jul 2012 10:12:30 BST, Paddy Landau wrote:
> > > Additionally, per the GNOME docs style guide, menubar should be one
> > word, not two
>
>
> "Menubar" as one word is really ugly. :-( I'm not sure that we should
> be mangling English.
>
> Are we perhaps looking in the wrong places? Surely there is someone or
> some team who decides the standards within Canonical, and we should
> ask that person or team?

I'm one of the people who worked on setting terminology for the 
upstream GNOME documentation. The GNOME docs style guide you're using 
is probably outdated (we need to update it - that sounds like a 
recommendation for GNOME 2.x).

When choosing terminology, we try to use terms that are (in decreasing 
order of approximate importance):

(1) Wholly unambiguous
(2) Easy to understand
(3) Validated by user testing
(4) Non-technical (not jargon)
(5) Concise
(6) Consistent with ingrained terminology

It's not always possible to fulfil all these criteria, but you can 
normally hit the first three at least. Once a term has been chosen, the 
next important step is to use it consistently everywhere (docs and 
software).

The term that we use in GNOME is "top bar", which matches (1)-(5). And 
yes - for (3), we actually tested this term on real users.

In my experience, this sort of discussion goes round in circles, and 
no-one ever makes a decision because no-one feels they have the 
authority. That being the case, I humbly suggest that you defer to the 
upstream GNOME recommendation, "top bar", as justified above. Does 
anyone have any objections to that?

Thanks,

Phil