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Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:51PM
I'd also like to know which jackasses thought that an "incomplete box with an arrow pointing into it" is supposed to intuitively indicate "log out" and that "three parallel horizontal lines" is supposed to represent the Menu.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:11PM
I've never seen arrow pointing into the box for log out (that I can recall), but I'be often seen it point out from it.
However - the two symbols yoy mentioned makes a lot of sense...
* arrow and box - indicating travelling through a door that's ajar (like on emergency exit signs). So it is a generic "exit"/"leave" symbol.
* three lines - generic for "list", and a menu is a list of items.
The weird thing is that we don't see both of those more for other lists (the odd arrows we use for expand/collapse are strange - having three lines for expand and a single line for collapse would make more sense), or as other senses of heading elsewhere (would make more sense than the circle-with-line that we use now for suspend/logout - the circle-with-line is more apt for a hard shutdown)