Looking Out To Sea

Whenever you have to configure something on a computer — especially in the case of wireless networking — you inevitably come across strange terminology mismatch. Each person that designs a user interface decides that the technical terms which the user needs to enter/know about are not friendly enough, so they get “translated” with some arbitrary scheme. Which is why the same information will be called password or passphrase or secret or authentication key depending on who tells it.

Maybe they have a point in some cases. If you’re steeped in the jargon none of it seems strange or frightening. But I can’t help thinking that maybe there would be less confusion if everybody used the same words to describe the same thing. From a quick check, neither the GNOME or Apple style guides deal with this issue.

The greatest example of this strange folly, and how it makes everything harder for everyone, is when you have to configure a standalone email client. None of the major ISPs seem to give out the standard details any more. Instead they have screenshots and step-by-step guides — a different guide for each popular mail client — telling how you how to enter the same data into differently-named boxes. Obviously this makes the problem of configuring an “unsupported” client much harder. Transferring details from one working mail client to a new one is even harder, as you ultimately have to guess which features the old mail client enables automatically, and vice versa. Nightmare.