The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/​Register Later/​Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat. This got me thinking about how you judge when an interface should bend to fit systematic rules vs. exert itself and its peculiarit...