
A custom dialog
In this dialog, the Help button is the only one with a label recommended by Motif. Since the other common actions
did not effectively represent the actions of the dialog, we chose our own labels. We decided not to use the Cancel
action because we didn't want to combine the actions of Reset and Close in one button. Instead, we separated the
functionality into two actions. The Clear button resets the controls without closing the window and the Done button
closes the window. While Cancel, the recommended Motif label, implies that the action specified by the dialog should
not be taken, Done merely suggests that the dialog be dismissed. Selecting Done does not cancel anything, it just
dismisses the dialog. Close might be more appropriate, but since the dialog is part of an electronic mail application
where the term "close" is used to describe the action of closing a folder, we are not using that label to avoid ambiguity.
We do not use the OK action in the dialog because it doesn't work with the desired usage of the dialog. Let's say the
user selects a date to search for messages and then presses the OK button to start the search. By definition, OK should
perform the action and dismiss the dialog. If that were to happen here, the user would never see the results of the
search. While Apply might be more appropriate for our desired action, we decided to use Search instead because ...