On 10/15/13 21:33, Ryan Lortie wrote: > hi, > > On Tue, Oct 15, 2013, at 15:14, Olivier Brunel wrote: >> I do not understand, however, why the entire GtkImageMenuItem widget was >> deprecated, and not just what relates to those options - since using >> icons in menus remain a very useful thing, and one used by many GTK apps >> out there. It makes better UI/user experience as it allows to accomplish >> certain tasks much easier/faster. >> >> The commit message mentions using a GIO API, but that's certainly not a >> "valid" replacement, since this is a completely different API and >> doesn't get us an actual widget/menuitem we can use in a menu. >> It looks like now every dev/app needs to re-implement this widget >> itself!? > > I can give a bit of a background to the reasons here. > > We make the distinction these days between "noun icons" and "verb > icons". Noun icons are icons that go alongside menu items that are > nouns (things like bookmarks, applications in a list, disk devices, > etc.). Verb icons are the old stock icons that we used to show beside > verbs (Save, Quit, Print, etc.).
Thanks for all this. (Even though I can't say that I agree with it, as a user having icons next to e.g. New/Save/Cut/Paste/Print/Quit/etc is quite useful actually; It also adds consistency between an action from a menu item and e.g. a toolbar button, ...) > > Take a look at this page: > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuLayout > > and take particular note of these paragraphs: > > "A menu item should have an icon before its text only where the item > represents a dynamic object..." > > and > > "Any icon that comes before a menu item’s text should be laid out as > if it is the beginning of the text..." > > and > > "In particular, icons of this sort should not go inside the margin..." > > These "dynamic object" icons (that we call noun icons in GLib/Gtk) and > are the sort of icons created by the GIO API. This is done in Gtk by > creating a GtkBox and packing the icon and label into it so you get the > effect mentioned in the spec above ("laid out as if is is the beginning > of the text", "not inside the margin"). > > GtkImageMenuItem puts its icon in the margin. We don't ever want noun > icons to appear here. > > I nearly added gtk_menu_item_set_icon() that would add a noun icon in > the proper place (ie: not in the margin) but implementing this proved to > be sort of complicated -- mostly owing to the fact that GtkMenuItem is a > container that can have arbitrary widgets added to it. Dealing with all > of the possible combinations of things that could happen with icons, > images, labels, boxes and other arbitrary widgets got complicated fast > and I just gave up. It was much easier to implement for > GtkModelMenuItem (which is how we get GMenu displayed in Gtk) because of > the limited scope and my total control over the widget, so I only did it > there. > > My thinking was that if you want noun icons, you can use GIO. If you > want to continue using GtkImageMenuItem for verb icons (ie: things like > "Save", "Quit", etc... the old stock icons) then you could do so. If Except not really, since its functionality was effectively broken in 3.10 : it doesn't show images anymore. Sure, one can add one call to set_always_show_images() for each item to get it back, but that means *a lot* of code that needs to be done *in every existing app*, only to fix what is indeed broken in 3.10 (since all that is only to restore the same behavior as with 3.8) > someone else wanted to add gtk_menu_item_set_icon() and take care of the > edge cases, we can still do that -- but this API should *only* be used > for noun icons, not to have an icon beside "Save" and "Quit". > >> Moreover, what's the justification for not only deprecated the while >> widget, but breaking it - and therefore any & all GTK apps using it - at >> the same time? > > I don't agree with this having happened. The deprecation is fine (and I > think we should drop it completely in Gtk 4) but breaking its > functionality during a stable cycle is not so cool. But how is having a widget whose sole purpose (over GtkMenuItem) is to show an image, and which it still did with 3.8, not show images anymore in 3.10 isn't breaking things? > > I did what I did (adding support for noun icons) because we wanted to > use them from GNOME applications and applications written for Ubuntu and > this is what I was working on. GNOME is also trying to move over to > using GMenu so it made sense to add the support for the noun icons > there. GNOME turns off "verb icons" by default these days and I think > that makes sense for GNOME (and indeed, GMenu has no support for verb > icons). That said, I still don't agree with (effectively) removing the > ability to have verb icons for people who still want them. > >> This is a widget that is only used when an icon should be present, since >> that's the whole purpose of the widget. With GTK 3.10 this behavior, the >> default/expected behavior since - again - that's the very reason to use >> this widget, is now broken. > > Note: this widget should only be used for verb icons. These are no > longer of interest to GNOME developers, but I agree that others may find > this desirable... > > Hope this provides some clarification. > > Cheers > _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
