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".
Sure it was. It certainly didn't happen accidentally. A conscious
decision was made to implement the UI, which on virtually all other apps
is native, by interpreting ASCII (or UTF-8 or whatever it's called these
days) text. Right?
> The design goal was "a
> cross-platform user interface" - in other words, the code could be
> written once and used on multiple platforms.
That was another one. Neither depends on the other.
> Skinnability came FOR FREE
> because of this.
Twice the startup time is "for free"? Three years spent reinventing
every GUI wheel in sight is "for free"? Complete and utter irrelevance
is "for free"?
> Nobody cares about skinnability.
EXACTLY! So what's the argument here?
> Get over the
> skinnability already.
Oh lordy, I wish I could! My heart aches when I see 'what they've done'
to Mozilla, the last best hope for a decent newsreader to replace my Nav
4.76 one!
> 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!".
>
I don't believe either of those is right, but I'll defer to others more
intimately involved with the process than I. It is my understanding
that:
1. Skinnability was always a top priority. Otherwise, how do you think
Netscape/AOL was going to get people to work on the project for free,
yet still 'private-label' it?
2. The decision to interpret the GUI was made long after that design
decision was made.
Are you privy to knowledge that this isn't the case?
> 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?)
>
So let me get this straight: You're saying it's simply a matter of
degree? That a file save dialog is so 'semantically' similar across
platforms that wrapping the native one makes sense, but that a *text
box* is so wildly different that it doesn't? Or a ***scroll bar***?!?!
Come on.
And yes, I do remember AWT. Do you remember Swing?
> > 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.
Then why do so much of it?
> 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.
>
No, I can tell them that regardless, and have done so. But I'll go ya
one better: wxWindows.
Oh, and does the Amiga even have a file open common dialog?
> 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.
"If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still
call him vile names." - Elbert Green Hubbard
