TONT 42583 为什么有些人将任务栏叫做『托盘』？

以讹传讹，以鸭传鸭。

原文链接：https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42583

Short answer: Because they’re wrong.

一言以蔽之：因为他们错了。

Long answer:

详细的解答如下：

The official name for the thingie at the bottom of the screen is the “taskbar”. The taskbar contains a variety of elements, such as the “Start Button”, a collection of “taskbar buttons”, the clock, and the “Taskbar Notification Area”.

屏幕正下方那一长条东西的官方名称叫『任务栏』。任务栏中包含若干元素，如“开始按钮”、一系列“任务栏按钮”，时钟，以及“任务栏通知区域”。

One of the most common errors is to refer to the Taskbar Notification Area as the “tray” or the “system tray”. This has never been correct. If you find any documentation that refers to it as the “tray” then you found a bug.

一个最常见的谬误是将“任务栏通知区域”称作“托盘”或“系统托盘”，这自始至终都不正确。如果你能在任何（正式（版）的）文档中找到将这一块称作“托盘”的，那就等于找到了一个bug。

In early builds of Windows 95, the taskbar originally wasn’t a taskbar; it was a folder window docked at the bottom of the screen that you could drag/drop things into/out of, sort of like the organizer tray in the top drawer of you desk. That’s where the name “tray” came from. (Some might argue that this was taking the desktop metaphor a bit too far.)

在Windows 95早期的build中，“任务栏”原本并不是它后来的样子，而是一个停靠在屏幕底边de 文件夹窗口，你可以将一些东西拖放进去，或从其中拖出来，就好像你桌子上层抽屉里的整理托盘一样，而这就是“托盘”之名的来历。（听到这里，有些人可能会觉得这已经是对“桌面”概念的滥用了）。

Artist’s conception (i.e., Raymond sat down with Paint and tried to reconstruct it from memory) of what the tray looked like at this time:

当初设计托盘这东西的概念图（即Raymond坐在电脑前，打开画笔，凭记忆重新绘制）大概长这样：

The tray could be docked to any edge of the screen or it could be undocked and treated like any other window.

这个“托盘”可以停靠在屏幕的任何一边，也能取消停靠、并像其它普通的（文件夹）窗口一样使用。

Then we ditched the tray and replaced it with the taskbar. We went through a doc scrub to change all occurrences of “tray” to “taskbar”. If you go through the shell documentation, you should not find the word “tray” anywhere.

不过后来我们抛弃了这种设计，转而用任务栏取而代之。我们把所有的文档扒拉了一遍，将所有出现了“托盘”的位置都替换为了“任务栏”。浏览一遍Shell的文档的话，应该是在哪里都不可能看到“托盘”这个词了。

A little while later, we added notification icons to the taskbar.

此后不久，我们为任务栏增加了通知图标（的功能）。

I think the reason people started calling it the “system tray” is that on Win95 there was a program called “systray.exe” that displayed some icons in the notification area: volume control, PCMCIA (as it was then called) status, battery meter. If you killed systray.exe, you lost those notification icons. So people thought, “Ah, systray must be the component that manages those icons, and I bet its name is ‘system tray’.” Thus began the misconception that we have been trying to eradicate for over eight years…

我想人们将这块区域叫做“系统托盘”，是因为Windows 95中有个程序的文件名叫“systray.exe”，其用途是在通知区域显示几个系统图标：音量控制（译注：俗称的小喇叭）、PCMCIA卡（那时候是这么叫的）状态和电池容量图标。如果强行终止systray.exe，这几个图标就从通知区域消失了。大概是因为这样，人们就想：“哎呀，systray肯定是管着右下角这些小图标的组件，我敢打赌那块地方肯定叫『系统托盘』。”这种我们花了八年时间想要根除的误解也由此产生。

Even worse, other groups (not the shell) picked up on this misnomer and started referring it to the tray in their own documentation and samples, some of which even erroneously claim that “system tray” is the official name of the notification area.

更糟糕的是，其它（Windows的）开发组（与shell开发无关的）居然接受了这个误用的名字，并在他们的开发文档和例程中用气了『托盘』的叫法，甚至还有大错特错地声称“系统托盘”就是通知区域的官方名称的。

“But why do you care? That’s what everybody calls it now, may as well go with the flow.”

“可是你们为什么这么担心呢？既然大家现在都这么叫了，干脆随大流不就好了。”

How would you like it if everybody started calling you by the wrong name?

那么，当别人都用错误的名字称呼你的时候，你又作何感想呢？

Summary: It is never correct to refer to the notification area as the tray. It has always been called the “notification area”.

总结一下：“通知区域”从来就不叫“托盘”，一直都叫“通知区域”。