RE: Awesome new Mozilla roadmap!

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

Le sam 05/04/2003 à 01:43, Sean Middleditch a écrit :
> On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 18:00, Julien Olivier wrote:
> 
> > As for the HIG compliance, why not trying to make Phoenix HIG-compliant
> > ? Why would'nt Phoenix developers want their app to be HIG-ified ?
> 
> This is the wonderful part of cross-platform GUI's.  Every platform has
> a different HIG.  Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME, WinXP, others - they all have
> different styles, etc.
> 

You're right but...

> You cannot write a GUI that properly fits into all of these.  Phoenix is
> an attempt to make a GUI that is consistant across all of these
> environments, and thus has to work the way most of its users' would
> expect (which generally means Windows' attempt at usability), and not
> the way a GNOME user would expect.
> 

but you can write a modular GUI and provide different defaults depending
on the OS/desktop. That means that the GUI should be customizable but
that doesn't mean that all those options should be user-visible. For
example, GNOME version should come with CANCEL-NO-YES button order while
Windows version would have YES-NO-CANCEL but there should not be a
"re-order dialogs buttons" option in the preferences.

> Things like the icons used (icon styles vary across platforms), spacing
> of elements, dialog style (everything from what text goes in the window
> title to the style of text in the body to the button ordering), option
> grouping, location/naming of menu items, keyboard shortcuts, etc. are
> different on these platforms.
> 

Well, there is a spec for icon themes at http://www.freedesktop.org. I
don't see why Phoenix couldn't follow it on Linux. Just make sure the
"classic" theme looks native to the desktop/OS it runs on.

> Epiphany/Galeon is a great idea becuase it presents an interface that
> follows the HIG for a specific desktop interface (GNOME).  Konquerer or
> KMozilla or whatever is great for KDE users, Camino for OS X users,
> stock Phoenix for Windows users, Eiphany/Galeon for GNOME users, etc.
> 

Really, I don't feel like splitting the user-base is a good idea.
Software are great if they have a big user-base. So, if Phoenix can feel
native on Windows, MacOSX, GNOME and KDE, it will have a BIG user-base
and that will make it better (more users, more big reports, more
developers, more themes, more extensions etc...).