Stuart Ballard wrote:
>
> 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?)
And the other part of it, besides, is that, in some cases, the DOM
requires more than just on/off type control. There's no DOM access - or
any other kind of access - to an open/save dialogue. And there
shouldn't be, IMO.
> > 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.
--
"I'm just tossing this out...but maybe we need a tax credit for the
poorest Americans to buy a laptop."
-Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker
