"Daggi Elehu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> jesus X wrote:
>
> > This is another think that irks me. The themes idea is an OUTGROWTH of
the XP
> > effort. It's a BONUS, not a detractor. When going with an easy XP UI, it
became
> > trivial to see how the UI could be changed by anyone via themes and
skins.
>
> Just to go in on a sidetrail here in the discussion. As someone very
> interested in HCI I fail to see the big benefit of the UI being able to
> "be changed by anyone". I firmly believe that the UI is a fundamental
> part of any application. A program is never better than the use it is to
> the user and if the user can't get it to do what he/she wants it _is_ a
> bad program, no matter what standards it follows or it's lean and mean.
That's not the point. Having the UI handled by XML and CSS
has two major bonuses, neither of which are skins:
1) It makes it easier to write Mozilla for several platforms.
The GUI library for Windows is different from the available
libraries for Linux, which are very different from the MacOS
GUI API, which is different from the MacOS X Aqua API, which
is in turn different from AmigaOS and BeOS, etc. Using XML
based layout allows the structure of the UI to be kept separate
from the platform-specific code. If it wasn't, porting Mozilla to
a new OS would mean rewriting the entire UI from scratch. We'd
probably still be on M5 or so, and probably wouldn't have
versions of Mozilla available for smaller OSs like Amiga and Be,
or possibly even Mac.
2) It reuses the Gecko rendering engine. If it didn't, there would
have to be *more* code to handle the UI. XUL actually requires
less code than the alternative.
Themes and skins are just a nifty side effect. However, there's also
something of an advantage there too: someone with a good grasp
of UI design can write a good UI for Mozilla without needing to
understand C++ and XPCOM and platform GUI APIs and Mozilla
coding conventions etc.
People complain about skinnability because it's an easy target:
"Skins? Who gives a damn? It's just extra crap." But it actually
doesn't contibute to bloat significantly. There are plenty of far
more important problems in the Mozilla codebase that cause bloat.
They just aren't as easy to see without knowing more about the
code.
