[thelist] RE: checked vs. unchecked boxes

[Kasimir K]

Hello, bringing in my 2c...

First of all, it seemed that there was a sense of "must/must not" air, 
so I had a look at the standards, and found nothing there relating to 
this - so it's not about a standard but a good practice. And indeed this 
discussion has brought me many new ideas on forms, their usability and 
my practices.

Peter Brunone (EasyListBox.com) wrote on 2004-10-21 19:10:
> The point in all this is that, according to some trustworthy
> usability standards, you should use checkboxes to give the option
> of doing things outside the normal flow or process ...
> and that their "off" state indicates that no action will be taken. 

This makes perfect sense to me. However, this brings one problem: it 
does not always go together with the use of positive wording. If the 
normal process includes a certain action, then we'd have to use negative 
wording: "don't do the normal action".

So my question here is which one of the following examples is better 
usability wise:
[x] do the default thing
[ ] don't do the default thing


.kasimir