951132 - Remove periods in app-manager.dtd tooltips

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools Graveyard :: WebIDE, defect)

Description

[Ton [:Tonnes]]

Attachment: Remove periods

Originated from a recent change in bug 937607, quite a few tooltips in app-manager.dtd appear to contain periods where they shouldn’t. This should fix it.

(In reply to J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=937607#c13)
> 
> Also, is this documented on a page I can refer to somewhere?  I was not
> aware of this policy.

Please don’t ask me where to find a Mozilla specific guideline about this (maybe someone else knows?), as far as I know it’s just a common one every developer should know about. This is probably why you won’t find (m)any other tooltips ending with periods in the Mozilla tree, as with menu items and selectable options.

Tooltips are generally written in infinitive mood, as they almost always describe the action (as a verb, not a sentence) and hence answer the question "What does this button (enable you to) do?." Exceptions are when they can be considered so-called infotips, where they tend to be one or more full sentences elaborating on something. Most often, this is where two or more lines exist - this file contains a few - and even then it’s risky to use periods. After all, using a period may cause a descriptive action text to be considered as a command ordering the user to do something, which can even be more confusing for English than for other locales that may distinguish infinitive and imperative mood in their grammar. Maybe it’s an idea to have a look at bug 561534 for further understanding.

The patch has been created against Aurora but should also do for central.

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Pike suggested that we verify with UX first.

Darrin, do you have an opinion here?  Remove the periods in tooltips or leave them alone?

Comment 2

[Darrin Henein [:darrin]]

Yes, I would remove the periods as this patch proposes. 

Probably worth creating a bug to look at labels too... when discussing this issue with Matej from our copywriting team, he noticed the 'Not Connected.' label and pointed it out as well.

Comment 3

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Attachment: Remove periods in App Manager tooltips

Ton, thanks for submitting this patch!

Cleaned up the commit message, no other changes.

I verified with Pike on IRC that the string IDs can be left as-is, but I will send a note to dev-l10n mentioning this change.

Comment 4

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Assigning to Ton, since he did the work here.  Thanks again!

Comment 5

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/34d6f424ae57

Comment 6

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/34d6f424ae57