Flexibility and Application Programming (Re: irc summary)

["Kenneth R . Kinder" <Ken KenAndTed com>]

I get the feeling here, Chris, that basicly you're arguing for rapid
development through shortcuts.  Didn't the KDE do this by using Qt?  Gnome
should take the time to do things right.

There are a few points I'd like to address:

 1. In your post below, you note that an APPLICATION programmer shouldn't
    have to worry about trivial GUI dicisions.  I 100% agree.  Ideally,
    the GUI would be less cherry picking, so that code like "themes" would
    be implimented just once - inside the GUI.  Unfortunetly, the defacto
    standard in GUI development is to "cherry pick" your user interface
    and dictate the geometric location of your widgets.

    In the perfect world, which definitly doesn't exist, and I'm not
    asking you to make it - in the perfect world, we'd present INFORMATION
    to the *UI, and expect that user interface to figure out how to
    display it.  This would mean that the application programmer would not
    only be lifted of the task of programming redundant code to manipulate
    widgets so they behave apropriatly for data, it would also mean that
    a GUI's user-defined style guide would be automatically integrated.

    In the realistic world, the one we might hope to dominate, I think
    "theme" flexibility should be somewhere between changing widget colors
    and widgets like the E window manager.  There's a healthy medium.  I'd
    like to draw your attention to the way KDE lets you choose between
    widgets that emulate a Motif look/feel and Win95 look/feel.  Now that
    doesn't completly pertain to the style guide - but it's interesting to
    note that the applications don't care or know what widget style they
    are running under.  I think this is optimal for a real world
    application.

 2. X's suffering from standards.  Right, well, that's true.  It's mostly
    due to Motif being proprietary, that a code base isn't commonly
    shared.  X programs behave differently, right?  So whip them into
    shape, and force them to behave, right?  Wrong.

    I think window managers are a class-act example of something done
    wonderfully elegant on X.  Consistancy is the goal, but only no each
    individual's desktop.  It's better to make a standard so hopelessly
    flexible for the user's configuration and additional programming.
    Projects which have followed this philosophy - like fvwm and E, emacs,
    and sendmail mark themselves and great standards.

 3. Doing what others are doing?  I think you implied that we ought to do
    what Apple did because they did it so well - make a GUI.  Sure, they
    did okay, but the Mac's lack of flexibility is so painfull, I won't
    use it, and if that happened so badly to gnome/*nix, I wouldn't use
    it.

    Steve Jobs is the software dude behind Apple and the Mac, right?
    Taken any note of his later indevours toward perfection?  OpenStep
    maybe?  OpenStep is very theme-inclined, and a far better model for
    anything than MacOS.

Ken Kinder
Ken@KenAndTed.com