On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 06:52:27PM +0000, Dermot Musgrove wrote:
> Hi, an attempt to find the third way :)
>
> Martijn van Beers wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 10:04:46AM +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > > Martijn van Beers wrote:
> > > > So, do I continue my work on the DTD, or will it never be used anyway?
> > >
> > > If you can convince us that there are major benefits from using XML
> > > attributes for properties.
> >
> > I doubt you'll be convinced of anything, given the experiences with
> > the palette (page)layout, but I'll give it a last shot.
> A Damon said, a massive structural change to the data would mean an enormous
> amount of work for a lot of people whose software processes the Glade XML.
I'd think if the app was nicely structured (unlike glade itself), it
wouldn't be _that_ much work.
> I would support any pressure to keep the structure the same (for now).
> I am glad that there is some inertia here because it would be too easy to
> make (probably many) new structures so that the use of Glade XML would be
> impossibly complicated. You would have to be ridiculously optimistic to
> think that a brand new DTD (and all the processing mechanisms) would be
> right first time.
No, the DTD won't be used until we have it right. It's not that hard.
and besides, the first versions would be in a development branch,
which normal users should ignore. As an add-on developer, you can
happily ignore them too, until you are assured it works.
> Imagine if every release of Glade had an XML structure that was incompatible
> with every previous and future version, isn't this is what a rigourous DTD
> means?
No, it doesn't. The only time the DTD changes is when new widgets get
added. Gtk+ and GNOME are pretty stable now, so that shouldn't be a
problem until gtk+ 1.4 and GNOME 2.0. Daniel Veillard also said he
would make it possible to have a different DTD for every library. So,
no. I don't think that will be a problem.
> I don't want to even think about the problems of supporting all the
> different versions of XML (in parallel) in a separate package. IMO, the
> time-lag in development cycles would make the whole idea unworkable.
You don't. A version of your package supports a certain version of
the glade DTD and nothing else.
> > I'm not saying attributes are _that_ much better, although they
> > do allow for :
> > 1) enums
> > 2) default values
> > 3) better specification of the datatype
> As I mentioned before, schemas (schemae?) could do all of this and more. I
> see at http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/ (5 Nov 1999) that there is now a
> working draft from w3c (moved on from a NOTE :-)) so I guess that they are
> definitely comming.
I bet it will take a LONG time before it will be a Recommendation. I
don't think it's a good idea to wait for that.
> > This might not be good reasons to change in themselves, but what we
> > have now is a bunch of tags thrown together as you went along,
> > and it doesn't make sense.
> The present structure does have the great advantage of being very easily
> extensible. Such a simple structure allows widgets and properties to be
> added without any DTD or parser-specific changes.
That's not an advantage of the current structure, but a result (I
wouldn't call it an advantage) not using a DTD
> However, in the long term I think that a more rigourous approach will be
> necessary.
The earlier we do this, the better. In a year, there will probably
be even more apps that use glade output, so there'll be even
more resistance from people that don't like changing all their
hard work around.
> I reckon that the only way that you can change the structure at this late
> stage is for Glade to maintain two parallel files of XML. One as now the
Sure, we should probably allow new versions of Glade to import
the old structure for a while, so users can easily upgrade.
Martijn
--
Martijn van Beers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
'Don't worry if it sounds odd. Believe me, you are talking to
someone who has seen a lot of stuff that is odd. And I don't
mean biscuits.' --- Arthur Dent
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