Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!moore
From: moore@cs.washington.edu (Charles Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: selecting contents of a locked field
Message-ID: <9507@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 89 02:01:12 GMT
References: <9490@june.cs.washington.edu> <8717@hoptoad.uucp>
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 25
Summary: user friendliness in deleting

In article <8717@hoptoad.uucp>, tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) writes:
> However, please be a little more user friendly
> than this.  I'd be extremely pissed if I wound up deleting a card with
> a press of the delete key.  Dangerous operations should always be
> advertised and safeguarded; if you do write some sort of key-trapping
> XCMD to do this, then at least put in a dialog asking the user to
> confirm the deletion.  

First of all, thank you Tim, and others for your helpful suggestions.

Second, I understand your concern with easy deletion of anything.  Yet,
isn't the select-and-press-delete shortcut exactly what already exists
with regard to buttons, fields, or portions of text in scripts or fields?
If you select a button with the button tool and then hit the delete key,
would you really want to have a dialog box pop up asking if you really
want to do that?  Now, I admit that deletion of an entire card is a 
potentially more dangerous operation since there's more information
involved but it seems intuitive to me that if you delete the entry for
a card from a purportedly complete index to the cards that the card itself
should be deleted.  What else could deletion of the index entry mean?
Furthermore, as with buttons and fields, it's already a two-step process
(first select, then delete) and so, difficult to do accidentally.  Does
it really need to be a three-step process?

Charles