It seems to me looking at the various sites out there created with DynAPI that the first thing everyone does is rewrite the GUI components. Most of the regular posters on the list have there own button widget or scrollbar posted on Richard's site and they all have one thing in common. Unlike the core widgets they don't use a zillion layers.
The standard components are just too bloated for any serious use. Try creating a page with a half dozen buttons and a scrollpane. How many layers? And most of those layers are wasted... just empty layers with a background color to create borders etc. Those layers could be put to use elsewhere. I know that the GUI components as they stand are more an example of what can be done rather than how to do it. But can I generate any interest/discussion about how to create a more practical set of widgets. Perhaps a border widget could be used as a base for button, just something that creates a layer with css borders? Straight away you reduce your layer count by 4 per button. And you also gain the ability to easily create panels or tab strips etc.. Also removing all those hard coded colors, font settings etc and switching to style.js or something similar to Dan's new theme code makes sense. By enhancing some of the GUI components to a state where everyone can actually use them without so much of a layer penalty everyone benefits - we gain more robust widgets because people will actually use/improve them instead of using them as a reference for yetanotherButton(). Doesn't it make sense to create and develop a usable set of components rather than to maintain code that never gets used anywhere outside the examples folder? sure there will be circumstances when you have to start from scratch for particular projects, but many times a good simple button or scrollbar that you know 100% works and isn't going to cost you a lot of layers is all you need. Thoughts anyone? ps.. I'm off now to finish yetanotherscrollbar.js :) _______________________________________________ Dynapi-Dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
