Re: 2.4 features - Indenting container

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 02:06, Evan Martin wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 09:38:04AM +0100, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > I think it's generally agreed now that we need a new container for right,
> > left, top, and bottom indentation. This would make it much easier to
> > implement the HIG recommendations. We could hack this into an existing
> > widget as a new property I suppose, but it seems much simpler to create a
> > new container.
> 
> Sorry to be so late on this, but is there a good reason this HIG
> guideline isn't being controlled on the theme level with GtkFrame?
> Aside from the added confusion of using a different widget for grouping
> subwidgets depending on how you want your UI to *look*, it also makes it
> more difficult for Windows-based themes to look right.
> 
> If you look at these screen shots:
>   http://gtk-wimp.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
> The XP-native is actually getting pretty close to a normal Windows XP
> program.  But the bold headers and indented widgets really stick out.
> If they were using a GtkFrame, it could look right on both systems.
> 
> (This is a separate issue from whether an indentation widget is useful for
> other reasons; I have no problem with that.)

My opinion here is that you aren't going to be make a dialog that
looks good with either Bold+ident or frames; switching between
the two changes the balance of the dialog significantly.

For example - you can use a lot more HIG-style categories than
you can frames - if a dialog has more than 1 or 2 frames, it's
going to look extremely cluttered.

To me, the XP screenshots don't look that out of place (and the
dialog doesn't have that great layout to begin with.) 
It's better to have a nicely designed dialog using HIG conventions
than a poorly designed dialog that tries to look more windows-ish
on windows and more HIG-ish on X.

Regards,
                                           Owen