Thats a good point, but is that not convention only? Its not required behaviour. Suppose I am on an XWindows system and I want MSWindows behaviour. That point about locale is a good one. A sequence of user actions must map to a state-machine that finally maps the sequence of clicks into a

function such as Maximise, Minimise, etc. Maybe its possible to load

particular the

map

If you want to have your application certified or branded on a particular platform, then you must follow the style guidelines. Most of the guidelines aren't written in stone, but gratuitous differences will prevent you from getting your app branded. For many, this is important. I think that any GUI should do its best to isolate the app logic from the presentation style and allow for OS specific GUI behaviors to be isolated away from the main program logic in order to facilitate easy porting to various OS-s rather than trying too hard to make it seamless, but vanilla. For example, something a simple as prompting for a file, Windows provides an API call for this that puts up the appropriate dialog box to navigate to the file and select it. The box may be different depending upon which version of Windows the app is running on, but the application doesn't have to care and they will know that the boxes are arranged in the appropriate order, have the right tab stops and shortcuts etc. Every ported app I have seen gets this wrong and it is amazing how jarring that is. I imagine that Mac users would feel the same, if they were prompted with a box that doesn't meet the Mac guidelines. This kind of thing is important for commercial apps. I am not sure how to accomplish this separation of app logic vs GUI logic, but it needs done if you want it used on non-unix systems. A GUI that is tailored to allow unix developers to port to Windows and Mac gets a big yawn from me. I would like a system that encourages developers from every platform to write their apps in a way that allows it to work everywhere and to do that, things need to be able to follow different style guidelines. I'm rambling now, so I will quit. :) Joe