RE: Implementing HIG style frames with GtkFrame

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 03:08, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: David Adam Bordoley [mailto:bordoley msu edu] 
> > This is related to bug 96374. 
> > 
> > I'm interested in working on adding HIG style Frameless 
> > frames to GtkFrame 
> > and have time to work on it. The above bug has alot of 
> > discussion on how 
> > this could be implemented but none of the core maintainers 
> > have commented. 
> > As I understand it GtkAlignment provides the necessary api for adding 
> > padding to the edge. Would the ideal way to implement this in 
> > gtk be to add 
> > an indent property to GtkFrame along with a special new 
> > function such as 
> > gtk_notebook_new_frameless? 
> > 
> > I'm a pretty inexperienced hacker, but this seems like a 
> > somewhat simple 
> > project to work on for someone new. Comments and suggestions 
> > are appreciated 
> 
> As I say in the bug,
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96374
> I don't believe a gtk_notebook_new_framless() makes sense, because that's
> just a gtk_notebook_do_it_like_the_hig(). 

I assume you mean 'frame'

> We just need to make it possible to be HIG-compliant without too much
> difficulty. The GtkAlignment API change has made that mostly possible, but
> we would still like to hide the GtkAlignment from the GtkFrame API. So, I
> think a gtk_notebook_set_indent() (actually a property) is all we need.
> 
> Most of the rest of the HIG-by-default stuff should be dealt with by Glade,
> I think.

I've certainly said it elsewhere at some point, but magically making
all frames HIG-ident boxes when running under GNOME is not right and won't 
work. The main problem is that the details of the surrounding padding will
be wrong.

You can't design a nice looking dialog without having some idea of
how it's going to look; frames and HIG indents are *different* forms
of grouping, even if they serve the same logical purpose.

My understanding of why we added the padding to GtkAlignment was that
we were going to do HIG indents as simply

 GtkVBox
  GtkLabel (set bold) 
  GtkAlignment (with HIG indent of padding on the left)
    <children>

If we were going to add options to GtkFrame or create another container, 
then the GtkAlignment changes were pointless.

Regards,
						Owen