Re: Theme suggestion: use shared libraries

[James Taylor <jtaylor emba uvm edu>]

Hrm... I'm beyond impressed. I was wondering if you could clarify a few
things for me:

> I have some comments on the recent theme discussion. I'm posting to
> both lists because someone posted on the gnome-gui list advertising 
> a hacked Win95/Qt-looking Gtk.

Could you post more information on this hack. Since it is applicable to
our discussion of adding themeability to gtk I would like to see how it is
implemented.

> * Modify the gtk core so that instead of drawing functions being
> statically attached to each widget class, each widget class (or
> perhaps even each individual widget) would have a pointer to a drawing
> function that would be changed at runtime. Also provide an interface
> so that this could be changed on the fly, and so that new drawing
> functions could be dynamically loaded and added to existing widgets.

So the actualy drawing of widgets would be handled by a "plugable
module?" With an api of specific drawing functions which could represent
all conceivable widgets. And this module would independently read theme
configuration (or whatever) to render the custom formatted widget.
Hrmmm.... So there's two levels of configuration? cool.

> Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to criticize the pixmap-based
> approach. I think Enlightenment proves how powerful it is. What I'm
> suggesting is that it be augmented by something that allows all that
> power and then some, but also allows ultra-low resource consumption
> for those who prefer - or will settle for - simplicity.

Enlightenment enters the picture =] I think that this is a great iudea
because it would address most of my conerns with enlightenment. I've done
a number of themes for E and the bigest deficiency I have found is the
complete reliznce of pixmaps. I would like to be able to insert a
different rendering module, and then have a specific
button/subwindow/widget use it to render a vector graphic. Or some other
method of drawing vectors rather than relying of scaled pixmaps. Hrm.
 
l;jt