JTK wrote:
>
> Well, that only brings up two more questions:
>
> 1. Why does Mozilla not need such control over the open/save dialog?
> Why is this not skinnable like literally everything else is? Doesn't
> that violate the whole design concept of "skinnability"?
Skinnability was not the "design goal". The design goal was "a
cross-platform user interface" - in other words, the code could be
written once and used on multiple platforms. Skinnability came FOR FREE
because of this. Nobody cares about skinnability. Get over the
skinnability already. The chain of decision did not go "How can we make
a browser that's skinnable - I know, let's use XML for our user
interface". It went "Ooh - since we're using XML for our user interface,
we can make it skinnable!".
The open/save dialog is a dialog that has well-defined semantics that
are the same on all platforms. That is, you give it a directory to
browse to and it gives you back the filename that was selected.
Therefore it is perfectly possible to use the native version without
violating the cross-platform mantra. On the other hand, scrollbars and
text widgets, have different behaviors and different semantics and
different ways of calling them on every platform. Writing a wrapper
which exposed enough functionality while still using the native version
on every platform to do this is impossibly difficult (there have been
many attempts, over the years, to do this and I don't think any one has
ever succeeded. Remember AWT?)
> 2. Owner-draw. The Windows common controls (eg the tree control) can
> be owner-drawn if you absolutely need to make them look nonstandard, and
> you avoid having to reinvent the default behavior everybody expects.
> You get the "Look", I get the "Feel", everybody's happy! Why not use
> that well-know and oft-used feature? You'd still be reinventing, but
> only the less-important half (ie the appearance).
But the re-invention isn't the point. If you can provide us with a
toolkit that provides a single API to the native common controls on
Windows, Unix (GTK, QT and Motif please) and Mac (Classic and OSX) as
well as Beos, QNX and Amiga (don't forget about MUI), THEN you can tell
the Mozilla builders to scrap XUL.
But if you were that great of a coder you would have written your own
browser and wouldn't be sitting here trolling the Mozilla newsgroups...
Stuart.
