On Wednesday 20 January 2010 21:01:47 pk wrote: > BRM wrote: > > The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless > > you are debugging the UI or the program itself. > > > > While a UI is important; a good UI is key. > > And a plain text editor is, imo, a good UI; everybody knows how to use > it. Why bring in another extra (translation) layer?
Another layer can be good, if properly abstracted. A good example is KDE's popups when you plug in a hotswap storage device. You get a context-sensitive popup asking you what you want to do and the choices are sane. You say what you want to do and don't worry about the implementation. This is good. XML OTOH was designed for a very specific purpose, and what hal does is not it. Too many UIs for things like this take the exact same info in the file, shuffle it around a bit, display some bits in green and other bits in red, and then try and proclaim that this is a VeryGoodThing(tm). But I've been around a long time and by now have a finely honed bullshit detector. It rings alarm bells when I look at the implementation of hal (but not the idea of hal). -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
