Re: the canvas quest

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 03:07:02PM -0500, John Palmieri wrote:
> Educate me a bit on this?

The short summary is just that writing a custom widget with full i18n,
a11y, etc. is quite hard and requires various bits of specialized
knowledge.

 - you need to have full keyboard navigation to do everything,
   following the standard keynav conventions when possible
 - you need to export appropriate ATK interfaces for a11y
 - you need to support bidirectional text
 - you need to be careful to properly honor theme colors,
   fonts, and sizes
 - there are settings such as drag-and-drop threshold that need to be
   used

So when you write a custom widget, it's a reasonable amount of work
and knowledge to get it right.

This doesn't mean you should never write custom widgets; what it means
I guess is that custom widgets are more work than you may have
expected. ;-) 


That said it sounds like your custom widgets are sort of the core
functionality of your app; core functionality such as Gnumeric's
spreadsheet area or AbiWord's word processor document or Mozilla's web
page display widget or MrProject's Gantt chart will always be a custom
widget, pretty inescapable.

You can always punt on some of the work of the custom widget until
later.

Havoc