Re: My Little Wish List for Gnome

[Jason Pellerin <jasonp pobox com>]

At 12:10 PM 1/13/99 -0500, you wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 09:06:37AM -0700, Quantum Seep was heard to say:
>> This would probably not fit in with the way menus work in GNOME, since it
>> uses one file for all the desktop settings.  Nevertheless, take a look at
>> it and see if it doesn't fix some of the issues we've been discussing.
>> 
>
>  This is a very neat idea..in my opinion.. :-)  Actually, I think the best
>way to handle this if you decided to implement it would be for the menu
parser
>to scan and parse all the menu files it could find in a specified order, with
>later menu entries overriding earlier ones.  Anyway:

I like it too. But I think that instead of looking like this:

>> [Internet]
>> location=/Internet
>> type=menu
>> 
>> [Browsers]
>> location=[Internet]/Browsers
>> type=menu
>> 
>> [Netscape]
>> location=[Browsers]/Netscape
>> type=command
>> command=/usr/local/bin/netscape

it might work better if it looked like this:

<menu>
	<menu_name>Internet</menu_name>
	<menu_location path="absolute">/Internet</menu_location>
	<menu>
		<menu_name>Browsers</menu_name>
		<menu_location path="relative">Browsers</menu_location>
		<menu_item>
			<item_name>Netscape</item_name>
			<item_command>/usr/local/bin/netscape</item_command>
			<item_icon>~/pix/ns_icon.png</item_icon>
		</menu_item>
	
	...

	</menu>
</menu>

That is, since XML is very flexible, and a common standard, and easy to
parse for both humans and programs, I think this config file (all config
files, really, but that's another issue) should be XML. (Though someone
would have to come up with a better DTD than what's implied by my
pseudo-XML above.)
 
Just my $.02 (what's that in euros?),

JP