[Glade-devel] XUL and Glade - Some more ideas and links

[james daa com au (James Henstridge)]

Gerald Bauer wrote:

> Hello,
>
>   you might wonna consider translating your Glade XML
> UI format into a more compact and human readable
> XUL-style format. 
>  
What benefit would this give?  There is a pretty huge impedance mismatch 
between the two languages.

>   I've create an early prototype a while back. See
> the glade-to-xul package @
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/xul
>  
Your prototype looks completely unmanageable.  First of all, it loses a 
lot of information found in the glade file.  Second of all, it would 
require changes to the XSLT for each new widget/property.  Furthermore, 
what would you do with this alternative representation?

In comparison, a glade file accurately represents a hierarchy of GTK 
widgets and properties.  In many cases, libglade requires no special 
purpose code to build the widgets (it depends on how well the widget 
supports properties).

>   For a more advanced protoype you might wonna check
> out Qatar - a qt-to-xul translator. The Qt Designer
> XML UI format pretty much looks like the Glade XML UI
> format.
>  
Once again, why would a Qt application author want to use this?  It 
looks like your program would require modifications as each new widget 
was added, and more code would be needed to build Qt widgets from the 
new file format.  The existing Qt designer file format maps directly to 
Qt widgets, which limits the amount of code needed to process UI files.


It is also worth noting that the geometry management of GTK doesn't 
match that of XUL.  So to convert a XUL interface to GTK widgets, we'd 
probably need to implement new container types.  Using the name XUL for 
a variant that had different semantics would just cause confusion (and 
the XUL authors have specifically asked that people don't do this).

Overall, it looks like this would be a lot of effort for little or no gain.

James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/