Poorly-Named Dialog Buttons

David's comment on my last post made me think about one of my pet peeves that seems to be pretty common: Cancel buttons that don't really mean cancel.

For example: Open a text file in Notepad. Do a "Replace" (Ctrl+H):

After replacing some text, press the "Cancel" button. What? It didn't cancel my replacement? Oh, I guess "Cancel" really meant "Close."

Published 26 August 05 07:30 by Adam Nathan

Filed under: Misc

Comments

# David said on August 26, 2005 11:08 AM:: Just because I indirectly caused this blog post, I have to come with an example of my own: The Cancel button in the standard Open/Save dialog. I know of several people that have been baffled by the fact that they were able to rename and delete files through this dialog, only to find that the changes to the filesystem couldn't be undone by clicking Cancel...
# Adam Nathan said on August 27, 2005 7:25 PM:: That's a tough one! Often there are "sub-actions" that one can take either in a dialog or in further dialogs spawned by the first one, and it's probably rare that cancelling the outermost dialog cancels the entire sequence of events.
# Miguel's place said on September 8, 2005 11:04 PM:: In one of Adam Nathan's recent posts he gripes about one of his pet peeves, which is that the cancel...
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