Re: menu separators

[Benjamin Kahn <xkahn cybersites com>]

	Why not just always put the seperator at the top and not at the
bottom?  :^)

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, Darin Adler wrote:

> Since this may be a Gtk issue, I'm writing about it here. Don't let the
> references to Bonobo fool you; the key is menus that are built up by
> multiple clients (main code and a shared library, container and embedded
> components), not Bonobo in particular.
> 
> In Bonobo, there are menus that are built up dynamically from a number of
> different sources. When this happens, you run into situations where it's
> hard to manage the separators properly. Here's an example. Let's say you
> have the following:
> 
>     Connect
>     Disconnect
>     -
>     Exit
> 
> Then you want to add some a command like this:
> 
>     Connect
>     Disconnect
>     -
>     Change Password
>     Synchronize
>     -
>     Exit
> 
> Bonobo has the concept of a menu placeholder, so it's easy for the container
> to establish the place to add new menu items, but the code that adds the
> Change Password and Synchronize items doesn't have a good way to know that
> it needs to add a new separator. If you put a separator both before and
> after the menu placeholder, then you'll have two separators in the original
> menu, with no menu items between them.
> 
> One way to address this is to create a smarter GtkMenuItem object for the
> separator. This separator would be completely invisible if the item before
> it is a separator. As an additional feature, it could be invisible if it is
> the first item in the menu, or if all items after it are separators. That
> way, you could add extra separators as desired, but they would always show
> up as a single horizontal line instead of multiple ones.
> 
> It's not too difficult to make a subclass of GtkMenuItem that works this way
> (only a tiny bit tricky), but I was thinking that it might also be
> reasonable behavior for the default GtkMenuItem in 2.0 to work this way. Is
> it ever useful to have a two separators in a row, or a separator at the top
> or bottom of a menu? If not, then this change would presumably do no harm.
> 
> Any advice on the best way to deal with separators for this kind of dynamic
> menu situation? If we decide it's not sensible to make a Gtk change for
> this, I may look into the possibility of making a Bonobo change instead.
> 
>     -- Darin
> 
> 
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> 

						-Ben

------------------------------------ |\      _,,,--,,_  ,) ----------
Benjamin Kahn                        /,`.-'`'   -,  ;-;;'
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