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Many eclipse panels use group boxes inappropriately. This leads to poor alignment and decreases the legibility and readability. Very often 3 out of 4 border lines of a group box are just obsolete; it can then be replaced by a titled separator or just by a plain title. In other cases you can completely remove the group box and just add more white space. The Mac Aqua Style Guide provides a section that shows several alternatives how to improve a layout by removing group boxes.
Is this in relation to drop-down menus? For example, the groupings found in the menu for File on the top menubar?
THese were added for the sake of accessibility. We should investigate removing them and getting the Z order sorted instead.
Created attachment 4996 [details] File search with group box replaced by a titled separator Find attached a redesign of the eclipse file search panel. It lacks three obsolete border lines and has aligned the right-hand side check box and buttons. Often, a Group prevents UI developers from aligning components. Although an advanced layout manager could handle it, developers typically do not align content inside the group with other elements outside the group.
You can find a bunch of alternatives on how to replace group boxes in the Mac Aqua HIG. Click 'Group Boxes' in the layout guide lines, see http://tinyurl.com/cvpb
Thanks for the pointers. We would like to do something like this, however whatever solution we come up with needs to be accessible. Screen readers like JAWS tend not to understand separators like this.
This is something I've noticed as well, it seems that many parts of the Eclipse UI uses group boxes, sometimes many right after each other (Window > Preferences > Workbench > Appearance). As well, platforms like the Mac and the GNOME interface guidelines recommend against using group boxes in most situations. Without a style guide of our own in Eclipse, I think the best way to approach this is to file bugs against specific dialogs with layout suggestions. I am marking this particular bug as WONTFIX, please open more specific bugs.
