[Glade-devel] what about using XUL

[tommi komulainen nokia com (Tommi Komulainen)]

On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 10:27, ext todd wrote:
> Sridhar R wrote:
>
> > What about using XUL instead of glade-xml.  Can anyone
> > explain what makes glade-xml to be prefered choice
> > over XUL. We (OSS community) need to standardize on
> > technologies.  Can anyone take initial step?

[I'm just lurking on this list, the following doesn't reflect the
position of the Glade team.]

I think it's simply because Glade was there on the Gnome desktop first. 
And I also have this impression Glade is more lightweight (in
dependencies) than XUL but I haven't really looked into it.


> I think this would be not such an easy task. XUL allows javascript and 
> CSS to be embedded in the xml. Perhaps, if the next release of GTK+ uses
> CSS instead of its current style format then this would be a little bit 
> easier. Also, perhaps if it was possible to embed gtk+ source code in a 
> glade xml file
> then this would also be possible. The point is the two are very different ;)

Well, I've been idly wondering why does Glade store both structure and
style in the same XML file while others (XHTML + CSS) are trying rather
hard to separate the two (more or less successfully.)

It should be rather straightforward to move spacings and other
properties outside the XML file into a separate stylesheet (using a
subset of CSS perhaps) and then you'd have something quite similar to
XUL:

<GtkWindow id="window1" _title="My Window">
  <GtkVBox id="vbox1">
    <GtkEntry id="entry1" value="" />
    <GtkEventBox id="eventbox1" />
  </GtkVBox>
</GtkWindow>

Embedding code... that's probably a harder problem.  Embedding C code
feels uncomfortable at least for me and adding JavaScript support is
quite a lot of work I guess.  It would be nice to be able to define
'Keep this button insensitive while this entry is empty' in the Glade
model, though.


-- 
Tommi Komulainen <tommi komulainen nokia com>