Re: Bonobo UI stuff

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Martin,

	I think now that the general public understand the issue - they
might share my lack of abhorence for images being stringified for
transport and internal storage. I really don't think the API is that
broken currently.

	Furthermore, the image transport is one of the slower parts of the
UI handler, and it currently involves no round trips. If we start
introducing stream IO / bi-directional CORBA comms simply to load a
single small image - I suspect we will achieve over design and
extraordinary application paralysis in double quick time.

	Thus I think while the factory solution was the best suggestion
made, and has a 'correct' design in a way that mangling URLs into the
stream doesn't - I don't think it is either neccessary or useful.

	However - what would be most useful, and what you pointed out
originaly is splitting out and sharing pixmaps - to a separate
namespace. Thus if a pixmap is re-used multiple times, it can be stored
only once thus:

	<menuitem pixtype="image" pixname="my_image"/>
	...
	<images>
		<img name="my_image" pixdata="10x13a001323234a..."/>
		...
	</images>

	This would save storage, and be more efficient for get/sets of
chunks of the tree which would no longer need to push / pull large pixmap
filled attributes.

	Also, doing the above is simple, quick and doable in ~30 mins.

	How does that sound ?

		Michael.

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