Hi Richard, My responses are below. I’m on my phone so I will keep it brief…
Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Developer / Black Lotus, Principal Consultant http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com https://www.openhub.net/languages/objective_c On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 03:29 R Frith-Macdonald < [email protected]> wrote: > > On 22/07/2026 06:35, Gregory Casamento wrote: > > # Compositional Structure: Nested objects should reflect the actual UI > > hierarchy (e.g., nesting an |NSView| inside an |NSWindow| tag). > > # Human-Readable & Editable: This will allow clean version control and > > manual merging. > > # Project-Controlled: We dictate the schema, protecting us from external > > breaking changes. > > I get where you are coming from, but suspect that maybe the only person > with the background to happily manually edit archives would be you. You’re probably right. I ran into issues when working with Keysight where more than one person edited a xib and it was easy to work out the conflicts and other issues. The xib format does lend itself to this but it’s not for the faint of heart. For that reason, I'd suggest that the primary objective should be a > format which is easily diffable: things are divided up by newlines and > there are stable groupings of lines between different versions of an > archive (no cases where a small change in the UI results in a huge > number of separate changes in the archive) so that changes produced by > diff are small/clean. Yes. That is a consistent problem. I’ve noticed that sometimes when making a simple change it results in massive differences. It seems as though interfacebuilder doesn’t preserve the order or ids when saving xib files. So yes, I agree that things need to be at least human readable enough > that we can make some sense of diffs when we need to. > > I don't know if that acctually requires your 'compositional structure' > objective: if not, I'd say that's nice to have, but secondary. Agreed. I felt as though it might make it more easily understandable. I find nib files, while they are xml, difficult to parse (in my head). I think your third point is an obvious given: who elses schema would we > want to adopt anyway? I don't know of anything suitable. Obvious to most. The reason I made this point is that some have suggested we use the xib format. I feel strongly that we shouldn’t do this, so this statement is simply meant to underscore that we should not use the xib format. Yours, GC >
