[Glade-devel] XUL and Glade - Some more ideas and links

[danw ximian com (Dan Winship)]

On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 08:47, Gerald Bauer wrote:
> Hello,=20
> =20
> > What benefit would this give?  There is a pretty
> > huge impedance mismatch=20
> > between the two languages.
> =20
>   I suggest offering an "official" alternative compact
> XML UI format in addition to your current
> super-verbose XML UI format. If you have a
> super-compact XML UI format in the HTML-style
> tradition you get lots of benefits.

Glade [the file format] and XUL are completely different things. XUL is
a presentation language. Glade is an object serialization format for Gtk
widgets that happens to use XML. It is not like HTML (or XUL). It's more
like SVG; it's a somewhat-human-readable description of visual data, but
having a super-compact simplified form of it would not be useful,
because it's much easier to draw b=C3=A9zier curves in a GUI drawing progra=
m
than it is to type out the control points by hand in emacs.

> First, you can handcode your XML UI if you want to.
> Using your super-verbose XML UI formats locks you into
> Glade. Or you can use server-side scripts such as
> XSL/T, PHP, Velocity and so on to create XML UIs.

But there's no reason to hand code a glade file. If you want to code the
UI by hand, you can just write out the Gtk calls in C (or python or
whatever). The point of glade is just to be a graphical way of
generating a description of the layout of a bunch of Gtk widgets. If you
want it to be something other than that, then you're basically talking
about a completely new app/file format.

-- Dan