Bug 9895

Summary:	Icon naming specification needs two types of next/previous
Product:	tango	Reporter:	Jakob Petsovits <jpetso>
Component:	default	Assignee:	Rodney Dawes <dobey.pwns>
Status:	RESOLVED MOVED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	dobey.pwns, jpetso
Version:	CVS
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Jakob Petsovits 2007-02-06 13:02:24 UTC

Applications use next/previous icons for two different meanings:

- Meaning no. 1: next/previous is concerned with the history of what has been visited. So 'previous' goes to the previously _visited_ one, not the previous one in actual order (whatever the actual order may be). This is generally needed for web and file browsing.

- Meaning no. 2: next/previous is concerned with the actual (alphabetical or otherwise fixed) order of the displayed elements. This has more diverse use cases, like image browsers, calendars (last week / next week), or anything involving a "list action" like specified for the go-* icons in the spec.

In most cases, those different meanings don't pose problems as only one next/previous action is needed. However, when there's an application using icons for both of the two different meanings then there's a clash. go-next/go-previous will be displayed twice, one time for each of them.

Example: Konqueror embeds an image view KPart that is able to browse the current directory. When the two toolbar parts (the Konqueror one and the image view extension) are combined, there are two next/previous icons on the toolbar - Back/Forward from Konqueror, and Next Image / Previous Image from the image view.

KDE solves this problem by providing two types of next/previous icons, one being 'forward'/'back' and the other one being (attention, ugly naming) '1rightarrow'/'1leftarrow'. Despite being named badly, most KDE apps are using them as intended.

So my suggestion is to add two new icons to the naming specification:
go-forward: The icon for going to the next item in the item history.
go-back: The icon for going to the previous item in the item history.

Different meanings need different icons, otherwise they will clash at some point. I am aware that this will cause a bit of confusion at the beginning, but I think it's necessary to have them.

Comment 1 Rodney Dawes 2007-02-13 20:23:00 UTC

I'm marking this as INVALID as we already have multiple next/prev icons in the spec, and in tango as well. There are go-{next,previous} for navigating history, such as for a web browser, as well as media-skip-{backward,forward} for navigating media libraries/playlists. I think the latter will fit well in the case described in this bug, of viewing a series of images.

Comment 2 Jakob Petsovits 2007-02-19 08:59:31 UTC

In principle, I agree with you. It's just that media-skip-{backward,forward} won't work for this, because it will always be drawn as something resembling a real audio/video skip button, like it's supposed to be. For audio/video, this works, because people are used to it. For all other stuff, buttons with an arrow pointing to bar mean "go to the last element", which is not quite the same as "go to the next element". So applications will use go-{next,previous} instead.

Have a look at, say, Eye of Gnome, which is (from what I can tell by looking at its screenshots) _not_ using the media-skip-* icons but go-* instead. Or Gwenview. Or GThumb (for which I could not tell from the screenshots if it's using custom icons or just a hicolor-like icon theme). Or KDE's Calendar window (the one that appears when you click on the clock), using a 1-arrow-{left,right} icon for skipping months, and a 2-arrow-{left,right} icon for skipping years. Or the originally mentioned Konqueror.

media-skip-* doesn't fit for any of those. go-* is neither the right icon for them, as explained in the original bug report.

I'm not a big fan of yet another arrow icon as well, but I believe it's the lesser evil. Have a look at the recent KDE commit http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-02-11/moreinfo/630263/#visual (import of Oxygen icons as icon naming specification named files) and notice that, on the very top of the icon list, there are the dreaded actions-arrow-{left,right,up,down}[-double] icons.

If such an icon is not in the icon specification, KDE apps will use the Oxygen one anyway, and we're a step further away from consistent cross-desktop icon usage. So please pardon me if I reopen the bug (once at maximum).

Comment 3 chemtech 2013-03-15 14:30:21 UTC

Jakob Petsovits 
Do you still experience this issue with newer soft ?
Please check the status of your issue.

Comment 4 GitLab Migration User 2019-02-16 14:41:31 UTC

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tango/tango-icon-library/issues/15.

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