Re: GTK+ canvas?

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Soeren Sandmann wrote:
>
> > Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu> writes:
> >
> >
> > > Much more people would make use of simple things like "draw a
> > > rectangle and drag it around" if it wasn't so hard.
>
> The "draw a rectangle and drag it around" use-case is somewhat 
> misleading; it applies most to something like a game, maybe 15-game or 
> Solitaire.
>
> plenty of HTML or Flash apps aren't really doing this.

   I think html pages and flash app _are_ in fact drawing lines and points,
maybe some vectorial drawing routines - text rendering etc. etc.

dont get me wrong - I think it would be great if we could have flash-like
functionality available in gtk+, but I think it would be 100 times superior
if all that great stuff were implemented on top of the simple hypothetical
"GtkCanvas" - that does just that: simple things like drawing vectorial
shapes with anti-aliasing, allowing widget embedding and even the embedding
of movies... how about something a little more far-fetched - how about
swapping your toplevel canvas for a gstreamer video output canvas derivative
and dishing out all that html/flash magic on top of that instead of a bland
white background ? (insert endless possibilities here)

Whether any of this is in reach or not is irrelevent, my point is more that
when you need a canvas, you want some really really simple building block
that you will use to do something very custom for your application - when
you want to implement a vectorial "scene" with embedded buttons and rocket-ships,
you might not even be aware that your GtkRocketShip object used the
GtkCanvas at all.

I just dont think we should dive right into writing up a GtkRocketShip or
a GtkFlashScene without having paved the way with a simple GtkCanvas that
is usefull to everybody first - rocket ships and geckos might also be
considered as unneeded bloat to gtk+, and could probably better be included
a little higher up in the stack.

Cheers,
                  -Tristan