Re: Glade GUI: changing mechanism

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

tomas tuxteam de wrote:
[...]
> My rambling above was put in misleading terms. I was not talking about
> the source of a libglade application, but about the source of the "glade
> compiler" or the "glade interpreter" itself: the meta-source, if you
> want.

Yes sure, the glade file is the most abstract representation you'll
find of a glade file, glade files are generated raw and are the
meta-source of generated code in previous versions of glade, now
they are just "the meta-source".

> [...]
>
>
> > Lets not sound misleading here... gtk+-2.12 should be featuring
> > the capacity to load itself from a glade file (or maybe a very very
> > similar format) - it will generally have the same structure and it
> > will be xml, only GMarkup will be used to parse that xml, not
> > libxml2.
>
>
> So it's a stripped-down XML. I am always afraid that all the issues XML
> has as a data description language (e.g. brain-damaged escaping within
> attribute values, incredibly complex whitespace handling at tag
> boundaries, two-dimensional hierarchy [is something to be expressed as
> attribute or as sub-tag?] -- I could go on) obfuscate the design of the
> abstract model. And there is evidence for my fear: look at the
> incredible complexity the XML consortia are producing. Would you know at
> a glance whether the models behind the XPath search specifications are
> compatible with DOM? I can't. To me, this is a clear case of
> decommoditized protocol, a reason to stay as far away as possible.

XML as a standard is one thing, remember that we are the people that
are generating the text file, and we're the ones parsing the text
file, using libxml2 and XML constructs to serialize objects into a text
file works and so we do it, because its practicle.

> XML as an input/output format (among others): yes. XML as the canonical
> format to design and understand my apps: no thanks.

  a.) Nobody said you should use a glade file to design and understand
      your app (note that if it were a binary format, you wouldnt even
      have a human-readable glade file).

  b.) XML has been the format of glade files since glade existed and
      its not currently up for debate - but thanks for sharing your
      somewhat belated comments.

Cheers,
                    -Tristan