Re: window-in-window MDI

[Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay labs interopen org>]

# Please take this out. It reflects very poorly on Gnome to have poor UI's
# as an option just because Microsoft had a stupid idea. Consistancy is
# sometimes better than choice. I think that window-in-window is a bad hack
# to compensate for a lack of Sawmill and anyone who likes window-in-window
# needs re-education :). As for users asking for it, well users are not the
# best HI designers and in practice many things that people ask for are
# never things that they would really want to use if they could see how it
# would really be. Almost everyone I have talked to about this thinks that
# window-in-window is an abomination and Gnome should not have it.

Users aren't the best HI designers. Without users, however, there's not a
great deal of point in releasing a package in the first place. Consistency
is only better than choice if the choices don't offer consistency. If an
application requires no modification in order to use something a user
wants, it makes no difference to the application developer. If people have
asked for it, and the work has already been done on it, and it's a case of
a runtime configuration option outside of the applications themselves,
then it makes sense to use it. It won't be switched on by default, and
nobody's forcing anybody to use it. Am I missing something, or are you
getting worked up over the one thing that everybody wants: choice?

Heck, I don't much like some software that ships with Linux, but I'm not
going to email the distributors and ask them to remove it because I think
it's a poor way of doing things.

Let people have their cake AND eat it. After all, isn't that what this is
all about?

-- 
Mo McKinlay                                T: +44 (0) 709 22 55 05  x1
Chief Software Architect                   F: +44 (0) 709 22 55 05  x3
inter/open                                 E: mmckinlay@labs.interopen.org
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