On Apr 21, 2006, at 2:06 PM, John Sunderland wrote:
I would never have imagined that MDI was such an emotive subject. What a lot of nonsense is being churned out even by people who I have come to understand as having above average intelligence. If you want a unified collection of windows with an uncluttered background, then that is what an MDI is for. If you don't want that then obviously you don't use MDI. If you want it for a Mac app then I have no doubt it can be designed and what you will have is an mdi, even if it not designated MDI.
A classic SDI application on Windows is NotePad which allows one to work on only one document at a time. File/New disposes of the document and opens a new one. You can interact with documents through the clipboard, but you must close the source document first, then open the target document from disk and paste into it.
A classic MDI application on Windows is Word. File/New opens a new dash numbered document, without relaunching Word. There is a single menubar at the top that supports all activities on any open document. There is a Window menu item that tracks the open documents. You can drag between documents. There are menu items which allow the user to organize and manipulate the open windows. It is the MDI that enabled Word, Excel,... to look very nearly the same on both Mac and Windows.
These are the features that I think of with regard to MDI on Windows. These features were implemented by MS in part to emulate features that were generally standard on Mac applications at the time, and MDI is fully supported in VS along with Explorer and SDI.
Best, Jack _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
