Re: scrollbar display options

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com> writes: 

> > Is there a tutorial for UI design with themes in mind?
> 
> As you point out yourself, this isn't really just about themes - i18n
> introduces at least two issues, namely UI flipping for right-to-left
> locales, and text changing sizes. Then accessibility introduces the
> concept of everything changing size, so that people with low vision or
> limited mouse precision can use it. So really you have these
> challenges for perfectly legitimate, serious reasons, quite aside from 
> the frivolous cosmetic themes. I'm just saying this since maybe it
> makes you feel better. ;-)

I know, but playing in Glade with frivolous cosmetic things makes me feel
good until the time comes to think about serious issues. And then I just
want to run screaming to the nearest non-GUI library source.

> Anyway, no I don't know of a tutorial. :-( In these two cases:

I'm not looking for a standard tutorial which explains things in a "this
is how you do it by the book" manner, because any general advice is likely
to be too general to be very useful in a particular situation (except for
"don't do this" parts). But I've seen some web sites with UI examples,
explaining why a particular implementation was or was not a good idea.

I don't recall seeing anything like that centered around themes. But that
would be pretty usable resource.

>  - with the buttons, you are just stuck with the reality that 
>    you don't know how big that text will be. So any UI that involves 
>    knowing that is doomed. Conceivably you could call gettext(), sort
>    the strings by length, then order the buttons accordingly, but 
>    that sounds like a Really Bad Idea.

It is.

>    Here I think the issue is really i18n, not themes.
> 
>    Anyway, I see no way to always get the effect you want there.

I never looked into what libglade actually does, so this might be
completely missing the target, but just maybe:

  If libglade can be used by an application to build UI on the fly, would
  it be possible to have several appearances based on the locale? The
  default one should be without hardcoded or special cosmetic stuff, so it
  would look OK in all situations, but the translators could be able to
  specify a different widget placement for their locale. I don't know if
  accessibility issues prevent this.

Any tutorial or introductory material on accessibility?

> Basically you can't ever assume any sizes are constant... we try to

Yes, I can. X server has no way to advertize resolution change. :-P
And even if that bug gets fixed, I'll claim conformance to the older
version. :-)

-- 
 .-.   .-.    Sarcasm is just one more service we offer.
(_  \ /  _)
     |        dave arsdigita com
     |