On Wed, 2 May 2001, Bruce Miller wrote:
> Although I dont have a better solution at hand, IMHO a lot of
> AWT (& Swing inherits enough of this) represents an opportunity
> missed.
>
> Many of us started out with Java years ago writting Applets ---
> and discovered there was no access to enough info about the
> browser to do a decent job (background colors, font size, etc).
> That's unchanged, and Swing _effectively_ isn't available to
> "most" browsers.
This is an unfortunate turn the web has taken. HTML stands for
HyperTextMarkupLanguage, with the idea being a generic presentation
of textual data, with the presentation provided by the browser.
HTML works great when the page designer choses to not control everything,
as HTML was originally designed.
I supported an internal website for several years at my last job,
and I couldn't dictate things like colors and fonts because we had
employees who were color blind and/or had visual impairments. If I had
coerced their browsers to use my own perferred fonts and colors, they
couldn't read the information they needed to do their jobs.
When I write code, I don't care where the widgets end up on the panel as
long as they're readable. I don't care what the font looks like as long
as it's the correct encoding. I'll use whatever colors and fonts the
user wants used. I write code on my 1600x1200 display, if I were to
hardwire my own fonts, the results would either be way too big, or using
some wierd default on the more common 800x600 displays.
> And though there are some nice ideas in layout managers, the
> way they work doesn't seem to lend itself to IDE's. The
> "Put a widget here" operation doesn't end up vary scalable/portable.
> [I'd be happy if IDE's have advanced since I last looked....]
> You have to develop an entirely different mindset to portably
> layout an application using layout managers (in Emacs) than you
> do using an IDE. (& GridBagLayout's a bear in any case! :>)
> So it's not surprising that "lazy programmers" take the easy route.
I guess I'm spoiled by JBuilder's designer. I've used most of the
layout managers and avoided using GridBagLayout because everyone said
it was "too hard." One day I was bored and decided to play with
JBuilder's Designer and discovered GridBagLayout is really easy to
use. Now it's the only layout manager I use.
> And finally, it would have been nice if the "Standard Font Set"
> also had some standard font metrics! Although the situation has
> improved somewhat, many early JVMs had really bad font metrics,
> particularly SGI's font heights were completely wrong. Even
> still, the characteristics of the fonts on different systems can
> be quite different.
>
> Consequently, even when you layout an application "Correctly", it
> often will look good on one system and lousy on another. Assuming
> that they (the programmer) is in error, they will then "Tune" it
> so it looks better on their development platform --- and consequently
> even worse on others.
I don't follow you. When I test my apps on the three platforms, the
layout managers always get it right. Nothing looks lousy, and I don't
do any tuning. Then again, I'm defining "correct" as "how it looks on
Windows."
The only size constraint I try to keep is that the initial size of a frame
must stay below 640x480 unless the app already knows the user wants larger
frames.
I think the basic problem is that so many developers are taught bad habits
with Windows from the very beginning. Neither they nor their instructors
know better. 20 years ago, programming was taught using time-shared
mainframes using general-purpose languags. Today it's taught on banks of
individual Windows machines in VisualBasic.
Sigh.
--
Joi Ellis Software Engineer
Aravox Technologies [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
No matter what we think of Linux versus FreeBSD, etc., the one thing I
really like about Linux is that it has Microsoft worried. Anything
that kicks a monopoly in the pants has got to be good for something.
- Chris Johnson
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