Re: Menus

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Jochem Huhmann wrote:

> The Right Thing would be a protocol and a kind of menu-server or
> menu-manager, that handles menus for every app that asks for it. If the
> protocol is fixed, this menu manager could be written with Gtk/Gnome or
> Qt/KDE or GNUstep or Motif or tcl/tk and the calling app couldn't even
> tell the difference. Menus (and toolbars) are quite limited GUI-wise,
> they just need to display some text or images, sub-menus, radio-buttons
> and shortcuts. All this could be expressed in a quite simple protocol,
> or am I completely wrong?

The problem with abstracting menus too much is that when you decouple them from their parent process (as opposed to their parent window), you have to start handling the communication between the menu and the application
_outside_ of the application.  I don't see any other way to handle the menus of different toolkits using a single menu manager.  Is this what you mean?

This would require all applications (GNOME and non-GNOME) to expose all their menu-driven functionality to external control (i.e. automation).  While it would be the Right Thing, it would be, IMHO, The Wrong Thing To Do.
The problem is that menus are too tightly integrated with an application's functionality to move them outside the app's process space.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

If this isn't what you mean, I apologize for the wasted words.  (c:

John