Scott Hanselman has a post on "old people icons" that don't make sense any more. This is one of those posts I've always wanted two write but never got to (or have I? ... can't remember).
The most obvious one is of course the floppy disk for "Save" long abandoned by Gnome and replaced with a down arrow (which makes zero sense, but whatever). One I had not thought of is the radio button, which of course matches those old radios with the buttons... The radio button as a convention in a dialog box makes total sense in and of itself. Calling it a radio button is of course atavistic.
He includes clipboards for cut and paste. This is out of place a bit, because a clipboard still makes sense as a thing (we still use them) but they NEVER made sense as "cut and paste." There were at one time icons used that did sort of make more sense ... a paste jar with a brush ... anybody remember what products use that?
Scott has many more, go take a look. I especially like some of the absurdities he points out such as "At some time in the past the magnifying glass became the "search everywhere" icon, but for some reason binoculars are for searching within a document."
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The most obvious one is of course the floppy disk for "Save" long abandoned by Gnome and replaced with a down arrow (which makes zero sense, but whatever). One I had not thought of is the radio button, which of course matches those old radios with the buttons... The radio button as a convention in a dialog box makes total sense in and of itself. Calling it a radio button is of course atavistic.
He includes clipboards for cut and paste. This is out of place a bit, because a clipboard still makes sense as a thing (we still use them) but they NEVER made sense as "cut and paste." There were at one time icons used that did sort of make more sense ... a paste jar with a brush ... anybody remember what products use that?
Scott has many more, go take a look. I especially like some of the absurdities he points out such as "At some time in the past the magnifying glass became the "search everywhere" icon, but for some reason binoculars are for searching within a document."
Read the comments on this post...