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>In most applications, when you issue a command that
>generates a dialog box with [yes] or [no] buttons, is
>it customary to also include a [cancel] button or is
>this on a case-by-case basis?
I've seen many dialog boxes, on both Windows and Mac, that have just YES
and NO but no CANCEL. As Amy Poos pointed out, a CANCEL button is needed
only sometimes--i.e. only if it does something not already covered by YES
and NO.
Something else to think about regarding form rather than function, which I
think is even more important, is that YES and NO are themselves usually bad
choices for buttons in a dialog box. Ideally, you want to make the buttons
say exactly what they do, depriving "negative logic" of any opportunity to
create confusion.
So a dialog box that says "Would you like to save your changes before
exiting?" with buttons that say SAVE CHANGES, ABANDON CHANGES, and DON'T
EXIT is much better than a dialog box that says "Would you like to exit
without saving changes?" with buttons that say YES, NO, and CANCEL. In
response to the second dialog, a lot of people are going to click YES when
they mean "Yes, save changes."
So if the interface has lots of dialog boxes that say YES and NO, then
*that* sounds like the problem to fix, not the lack of a CANCEL button.
But as Geoff Hart pointed out (I'm afraid this goes to function more than
form), the user does need that third option a lot of the time--especially
in an interface that relies heavily on YES and NO.
