Re: GTK+ canvas?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
>  < Havoc >
>  My opinion is that the canvas should "replace" the GTK core in a way, 
> i.e. GtkWidget
>  becomes a specialized thing you can embed in a canvas.
>  This obviously makes the canvas into a pretty big project.
>
> Kindof disagree here - I think that in most cases a canvas is needed 
> when one
> leaves the boundries of a simple UI. Core GTK widgets offer standard 
> tools for
> standard proceedures, stock icons, hig complient dialogs and everything is
> supposed to be theme friendly. On the other hand, when you want to plot 
> out an accel
> sheet or draw a map with clickable "city" items, or anything at all 
> visually
> specialized - then you are looking at canvas work.

What I mean is that the canvas tends to be more flexible / less 
specialized while gtk focuses on displaying something specific 
("widgets") - so the natural thing is that the canvas is the "base" or 
the "superset" and gtkwidget is the "specialization"

Just like you can have buttons, etc. in an HTML page, but HTML as a 
whole is much more free-form.

> Luckily; since markup language is already an integral part of gtk+ 
> design, it wouldnt
> have to be part of the canvas design at all - canvases and canvas items 
> should simply
> be buildable from thier properties and the GtkBuilder should take care 
> of it natively.

Quite possibly. Something to keep in mind though is that a builder UI 
can be programmer-oriented (Glade) or designer-oriented (Flash), and you 
get a really different flavor to apps depending on what this app 
encourages. Sort of social engineering through software design or something.

Havoc