Hi, On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 03:53:23PM +0100, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote: > On Sun, 2003-01-19 at 13:07, Emile van Bergen wrote: > > > True. But what is the right thing if you want to control a GUI, > > preferrably at the widget level? > > > > Not X, not PNG, not HTML. > > > > We simply don't have a protocol for that yet, only big fat APIs that are > > not even APIs but "APFs", application programming frameworks (yuck). > > Hmmm. I fear that if you want something universal supporting all > often-used widgets in todays GUIs and being extensible etc. etc., you > will no matter how you start arrive at a big, fat thing. Perhaps it's a > protocol and perhaps things are distributed differently between 'server' > and 'client' (X terminology), but big, fat it will stay. Or you could > keep it simple, and people would complain that it can't do X and it > can't do Y and it can't do Z. Then they would either add X, Y, and Z to > it, or they would just not use it. I don't mind fat or big software, as long as there's a simple model behind it, or if at least the interactions between the big fat blobs of code can be described in simple terms. I do mind if the model itself is fat and big and needs more and more ugly ad-hoc adjustments for new things to fit. > No, I haven't studied many GUI toolkits, but the fact that all > widespread toolkits have a certain basic complexity seems to support my > opinion somewhat. Somewhat, perhaps, but on the other hand, such a reasoning would also suggest that Windows is evidence that computers in general cannot be prevented from random crashes and that maintaining a system means that you may always arrive at a point where you will need to reinstall from scratch. I still believe, and it is my hope, that it is due to too much design in the wrong direction that most GUI toolkits become so ugly after some development time, and that a different model may improve things significantly. If I turn out to be wrong, then I guess I'll stick to writing UI-less software. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | emile@e-advies.info tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info
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