Article-I.D.: Shasta.1250
Posted: Wed Oct 16 13:50:38 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 20:25:05 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 31

Most of the "SubMenus" comments on the net seem to be in favor of submenus.
I question this as a feature that can easily be misused. Submenus allow 
nesting of functions in the way that the author thought about his program.
If you think about the available functions in some other, perhaps logical
way, tough. A not so contrived example might involve nesting the size menu
inside the font menu, or nesting the font menu inside the size menu. Each
offers a complementary view of a 'tree' of possibilities when there are
actually two independent elements involved. Notice that in both of these 
cases, the items on the second level must appear under several top-level
items. Most "nested menu" systems do not allow for this. On the other hand,
since mac menus are "spring loaded," that is, they go away as soon as you
let go of the mouse, there is little room for comfusion as to where you are
in the menu heiarchy.

The current Mac interfasce has built into it, two levels of nested menus,
and perhaps a third idicated by the (...) which means that more options are
available within a dialog. If you feel you really need more than this,
perhaps you ought to review your interface, and perhaps place some of your
controls in your windows instead of on the menubar.

My general attitude is to avoid arbitrary nesting as much as possible,
because it is my firmly held belief the humans do not have stacks in their
brains and thatlast in-first out memory just does not come naturally. I give
an example of man's fascination with the towers of hanoy puzzle. This game,
while trivial for a computer to solve, is quite challenging for humans beyond
the first few levels.

On the other hand, too flat a structure makes individual items hard to find
just as it is hard to find a city in a large map without an index. Two or
three levels of nesting in an arbitrary DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)
structure seems to be about right when carefully thought out.