Re: ui thoughts

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi Dan,

On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Dan Winship wrote:
> It's weird that to make a menuitem separator you say "<menuitem/>",
> but to make a toolbar separator you say "<separator/>", not
> "<toolitem/>".

        The <menuitem/> syntax for creating a separator is deprecated; it
will continue to work since with Gtk+ 1.2 you create a separator by
creating a menuitem with no label. Please use <separator/> in both cases,
and fixup any old xml files you find with this.
  
> It's also weird that verbs/commands are sometimes called verbs, and
> sometimes called commands. 
 
        Verbs and Ids are in the 'commands' namespace, the distinction in
the documentation is important. See '* So how is this separation achieved
in practice' in the ui-faq.txt perhaps.

> (And why "cmd"? If you can type "menuitem", you can type "command".)

        Well; if you wish to call the thing thisisaverylongstring, feel 
free, the cmd name is not validated, and it does not appear in the path;

<commands>
        <cmd name="Fish">
</commands>

        is referenced as /commands/Fish.

> I still don't like the meaning of verb="". I actually think it would
> make more sense to have that mean "no verb", and have no verb entry
> mean "default verb name".
  
        This is still confusing you after I explained it ? how is the UI  
handler supposed to know whether you are interested in looking at state-  
full changes on this item, or merely getting a verb when it is activated.
This is the reason for specifying that we want to associate a verb with   
this item.

        Again, if you want to cause yourself unneccessary pain, feel free
to type out the string as many times as you want. I didn't somehow feel   
like doing unneccessary typing whilst generating the UI descriptions from
the GnomeUI structures by hand.
  
        Either way, the new UI handler is by no means perfect or complete,
it is just considerably nearer perfection, and far more complete than what
it replaced. It is also hard API frozen. I hope the next rev. will be even
better for Gnome 2.0.

        Regards,
  
                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot