The codebase has distinct concepts of "related" and "unrelated" controls, but the distinction is poorly defined.

I argue that "related" controls should be things like a checkbox and that checkbox' label, or the vertical distance between two radio buttons in a group.  In other words, things users would think of as one logical control.  All other cases should be "unrelated".  (Borderline case I don't know how to decide: an icon with a descriptive label right next to it, as in the page info dropdown.)

If we make this change, I think the "related control" distance should be 8-12 DIPs (I suggest 8).  It's currently 16 in the codebase.  This would most obviously affect checkbox/radio-to-label distances, but it also affects how columns of items stack (the spec tends to talk about such cases in terms of the heights of whole rows, which have implicit padding internally, rather than as padding values between unpadded elements, so it's hard for me to say precisely what effect this would have).

Assigning to bettes@ initially in hopes of settling on this value.

Once that decision is agreed on, the rest of this bug will be about changing existing usage to comply with the above (mostly to make existing "related" usage "unrelated"), and trying to eliminate the "item label spacing" constant in favor of one of the two constants above.  Tentative plan is to give this to bsep@.