OK or Cancel

This post has nothing to do with skyscrapers. The fact it has nothing to do with skyscrapers has nothing to do with the previous post; I met Tom on Wednesday, who told me he read my blog a few times while he was in Nicaragua... but this didn't get picked up by Google Analytics or Clustrmaps. I can therefore quite happily convince myself that I'm getting literally bilions of unrecorded hits.

What this post is about is the convention that "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are always right next to each other in graphical user interfaces. Why? Why put two things which do the complete opposite to each other - sometimes with disastrous consequences - right next to each other, thus making it eay to accidentally do the opposite to what you wanted? It makes far more sense to leave a substantial gap between the buttons. In dialogue boxes in Windows (and also, it has to be said, design gurus Apple) there is normallyt plentiful room to spread them out.

I'm assuming no-one's ever thought of this before because:

• There are thousands of software companies out there
• If you have the idea, then implementing it would be easy, and without dire consequences
• But no one's done it in their software or websites

I conclude that I am a design genius

And I bid you goodnight