Re: please do not hardcode look and feel in apps

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

Please note that the HIG does not contain anything which cannot simply be
done with existing libraries, unless somebody goofed up. I at least never
planned to write any thing that would, though I have at least one note
on a pending item with a pointer to the bugzilla entry. [*]


On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 05:26:09PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
<snip> 
> Thinking about this a bit more, it seems to me that it would be good
> to have two editions of the HIG. One would describe current best
> practices, easily implementable with standard libraries. The other
> would describe the target design, and would have links to the
> relevant bugzilla bug reports where appropriate.
> 
> I suggest this because it's hard to keep a picture of a complete,
> coherent design in mind based on a document that does not quite match
> it, plus a bunch of scattered bug reports and discussions.
> 
> The "current best practices" HIG would be the one we ship with GNOME
> as part of the developer docs and try to conform to for 2.0, and the
> other would be a sort of "unstable branch" of things the Usability
> group wants to see in future GNOME releases.

This sounds like a good idea to me. Even if tracking two versions might
be a headache, it's so much better than having nothing as design goals
that I think it is worth it. (I'm speaking of tracking as one of the
authors of it. I don't mean for other people to track both, though they
are obviously welcome to do so.)


> Another possibility is to have only one edition of the HIG, but with
> commentary on possible future changes. But I worry that this would
> confuse developers and designers reading the HIG, even though it might
> be more convenient for the HIG team.

I don't think we've done this yet except in notes to each other which could
be moved elsewhere or handled with the magic of xml.


> Regards,
> 
> Maciej

Cheers,
Greg Merchan


[*] The item is authentication alerts and the bugzilla entry is about the lack
 of a stock item for this. It was written before I was aware of the absence
 of that stock item and it's still there because I haven't checked on it
 and anticipated the bug would be closed before the next release of the HIG.
 This kind of alert is not often needed, so if it's left and followed
 there would be probably only three apps needing to add a special stock
 item which the toolkit now allows anyway. Though, if GtkMessageDialog
 is restricted to a subset of stock, I'll have to see what else might
 be used.

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