Re: Accessibility module loading

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Michael Meeks wrote:
> 
> Hi Padraig,
> 
> On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Padraig O'Briain wrote:
> > I take the view that accessibility support should not be an add-on but
> > the accessibility support for a widget should be in the same library
> > as the widget.
> 
>         I personaly think this is a mistake, I am not convinced that the
> (huge: a new API per new widget in Gnome ultimately) gail API should be
> frozen and exposed to the public.
> 
>         I have a growing convinction that we need to be able to expand and
> modify the gail APIs in future - and of course, this we cannot do if every
> core Gnome library is using them.

There may some misunderstanding going on here.  Padraig's proposal, as I
understand it from talking to him, doesn't involve any gail
dependencies.

The only accessibility APIs that widgets can usefully implement or
extend are ATK APIs, therefore already exposed.  ATK is of course
extensible, but in the same way as any other GNOME API, via API
additions, and incompatible changes would be discouraged most strongly. 
We think that post-2.0 we can add API to ATK compatibly if required
without breaking binary compatibility.
 
Gail doesn't export any API and Padraig's current work is in pursuit of
the goal of keeping it that way while enabling some implementation
reuse.  I think that his position that accessibility support belongs, in
general, within the widget libraries themselves, is a very justifiable
one and reasonable for widgets outside GTK+-core.

The ATK API, which is already exposed and a dependency of GTK+, is not
that huge, and our opinion, based on experience to date, is that the
code required to implement it for a given widget library is not terribly
large in comparison to the existing widget code.



Regards,

Bill

>         Regards,
> 
>                 Michael.
> 
> --
>  mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot