Re: XML again

[Phil Dawes <philipd parallax co uk>]

Miroslav Silovic wrote:
> 
> allen rouse <arouse@austin.ibm.com> writes:
> 
> >       Sometime ago I posted a suggestion about using XML ideas (very
> > wishful thinking) to replace the current GUI technology. A few found
> > the idea interesting. It was also suggested that the discussion,
> > what there was of it, be moved to the gui-list but the thread was
> > already dead by that time.
> 
> I think that almost /any/ scripting language would work better for GUI
> design than XML would. After all, it makes no sense to use script for
> GUI design if you can't also use it to implement even the most trivial
> callbacks.
> 

One area where XML would be good is in defining static GTK gui's in a
language independent way. There are a lot of language bindings for GTK,
and to develop a GUI builder for each would be very time consuming. If
however the gui builder exports the gui layout as an XML file, this can
be parsed and converted into the language of the users choice by a
back-end program, or even interpreted at runtime (if the developer wants
the ability to change the gui at easily at runtime). The callbacks would
obviously be written in the target language rather than in the XML file.

I mentioned this a while ago on the GTK list, and I think that the
author of the guide project is considering using an XML (or at least an
XML style) format for saving gui layouts from his program. (although I
think he arrived at the idea seperately rather than through my ramblings
;-)

Cheers,

Phil.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
 Phil Dawes                               |   My opinions are my own
 WWW:    err.. temporarily non-existant   |   and nothing to do with
 Email:  philipd@parallax.co.uk           |      my employer.