Re: Form buttons gtk theme

[Philip Langdale <philipl mail utexas edu>]

Olafur Arason wrote:
> Why has Window themed form buttons while linux has none.
> I was searching though the bugzilla on mozilla and the only
> bug I found about it sayed that gtk didn't support background
> themeing but that is false, I've tried it out my self after seeing
> a screenshot that had it. But on Windows when a button has
> to change color it goes to the old buttons used on linux, so
> linux has better support for this but there is no implementation.
> I saw some discussion about this that sayed that a galeon
> programmer had tryed to fix it but it was to deeply ingrained.
> This is the biggest sore thumb when render web pages on linux.

The basic situation is that no native widget toolkit, and certainly
not gtk, has the ability to draw a button in a way that conforms to
the full CSS spec. This is the reason why you see the buttons stop
looking native on windows when CSS rules are applied. ie: Windows
only draws a native button if no CSS rules are applied.

On linux, it happens to be the case that mozilla never draws a native
button but there is no reason, in principle, why this cannot be done;
It's just that no one has done it yet. There used to be some
experimental code that used XBL to draw the buttons and this sort of
worked but it was always very limited. I don't know if the current
windows native drawing code is using this mechanism or a different
one.

--phil