{"id":11859,"date":"2012-05-14T12:15:19","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T12:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2012\/05\/14\/nonsensical-icons-why-is-there\/"},"modified":"2012-05-14T12:15:19","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T12:15:19","slug":"nonsensical-icons-why-is-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/14\/nonsensical-icons-why-is-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Nonsensical Icons: Why is there a &quot;V&quot; on top of my television!?!?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scott Hanselman has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hanselman.com\/blog\/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx\">a post<\/a> on &#8220;old people icons&#8221; that don&#8217;t make sense any more.   This is one of those posts I&#8217;ve always wanted two write but never got to (or have I? &#8230; can&#8217;t remember).<\/p>\n<p>The most obvious one is of course the floppy disk for &#8220;Save&#8221; 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&#8230; The radio button as a convention in a dialog box makes total sense in and of itself. <em>Calling<\/em> it a radio button is of course atavistic.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;cut and paste.&#8221;  There were at one time icons used that did sort of make more sense &#8230; a paste jar with a brush &#8230; anybody remember what products use that?<\/p>\n<p>Scott has many more, go take a look.  I especially like some of the absurdities he points out such as &#8220;At some time in the past the magnifying glass became the &#8220;search everywhere&#8221; icon, but for some reason binoculars are for searching within a document.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scott Hanselman has a post on &#8220;old people icons&#8221; that don&#8217;t make sense any more. This is one of those posts I&#8217;ve always wanted two write but never got to (or have I? &#8230; can&#8217;t remember). The most obvious one is of course the floppy disk for &#8220;Save&#8221; long abandoned by Gnome and replaced with &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/14\/nonsensical-icons-why-is-there\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Nonsensical Icons: Why is there a &quot;V&quot; on top of my television!?!?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5020],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-35h","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}