On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 10:00:14 -0700 From: Jon A. Cruz <jon@...18...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Put your menu where your mouth is
On Jul 31, 2005, at 2:24 PM, Alan Horkan wrote:
The standard UI XML for GTK+ is approaching the problem from the complete opposite direction of what we need (presentation vs. information, physical vs logical, etc) and actually complicates things.
... that sounds highly illogical.
Maybe it is unintentional and if you mention it to the Gtk+ developers and propose things they will listen. Does take a terribly long time for their changes to reach the desktop where you can depend on them though.
No, not illogical at all. The point makes perfect sense.
It's very intentional in their part. It's a completely different problem they're solving.
They had a complex setup with much low-level pixel-tweaking being exposed through an XML wrapper. It's very much in line with Glade or XUL.
On the other hand our needs line up with wanting something abstract and high-level that operates purely in the logical realm instead of the physical. That is very much in line with XForms and CSS.
I've created enough web pages for this to make a lot of sense to me.
From there I went to creating java user interfaces and they are generally
designed to flow and be rescalable much like web interfaces. Learning the box layout of Gtk felt like a giant step backwards.
Gnome focussing on the fixed style and placement seems like it is intended to solve current problems but strikes me as something of an evolutionary dead end. I'm surprised Sun haven't taken a stab at improving Gtk but that would go against their efforts to get everyone to use Java.
One interesting example is XForm's "<trigger>" element. On a form, this is often represented as a button. However, stylesheets could be used to present it in many forms, and if it's contained in some form of menu, it could appear as a menu item instead.
Functionally a menu item and a button are pretty much the same. They differ in where they are placed and how they look, but otherwise work the same.
the gimp script-fu includes a few input types which can be represented using different widgets, and I made suggestons about taking it futher (a radio list and a drop down menu can be used to represent the same information depending on the length of the list and the amount of space available).
Oh, and also there are limitations with it not being able to deal with custom widgets and such. It's been crafted to serve certain purposes, and in hand with Glade markup it does a decent job at that purpose, but our needs are different.
I'd be extremely surprised if their future needs were not similar so it may yet be possible to keep things compatible.
(BTW, since they added GtkAction as of GTK+ 2.4 we can start shifting to leveraging those also, but there still are subtle issues with that)
Thanks again Jon
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/