Re: RFC: boxes

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 19:01 +0100, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> So, next idea. I'm pretty sure about this one actually and have talked
> to it with people on IRC a lot. Again I have no idea how it will look
> in detai, but I know I want to get there.
> 
> This one is all about layouting complex widgets. It again has nothing
> to do with the public API or ABI of GTK and is all about structuring
> our internal code. Well, it is about theming.
> 
> The thing you want to have read or at least have heard about are these 2:
> box model: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/box.html
> visual formatting: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html
> In particular the first.
> 
> If we want to allow people to really style widgets with CSS, the
> widgets need to behave like CSS boxes.

[snip]

> While we're at it, we also need to get rid of all the old style
> properties we had and make sure they can be sanely replaced by CSS we
> support.

Just a small bit of input: There's nothing in CSS like GtkBox::spacing.
I really wish there were. I can't tell you the number of times I've set
margin-top on children and overridden it on :first-child to accomplish
what GTK+ makes easy. Please let's not lose that.

--
Shaun