Words on a page

How much is that doggie in the window?

One thing that many tech writers and their editors get prickly about is word usage. And sometimes that debates about what words to use drag on and get incredibly vicious. At one company were I worked, the debate was over the use of the word "window."

You'd figure that in this day of graphical user interfaces, the term window would be considered ubiquitous and easily understood. Well, I found out that this contention was way out there. The folks on the standards committee at the company I mentioned spent two years arguing about whether to use "in a window" or "on a window." Draw your own conclusions.

But that seemingly-endless debate was never resolved. Why? Because, for a while at least, all mentions of GUI elements (including window) were banned from the documentation. Mainly because the company went straight from "green screen" mainframe applications to Web-based applications. -- essentially moving from a text-based world into one where windows theoretically don't exist. Unfortunately, the team I was on documented PC-based applications, with windows galore.

One reason that I was given for not using the term window was that "window is an arbitrary term." That smacks of general semantics to me. But let's be honest, window is hardly an arbitrary term. It's used on multiple platforms: MS Windows (obviously), MacOS, Linux, even GEOS.

The worst part is that they never realized how silly something like "On Reformat XML File ..." sounded.