[HIG] Re: [Usability]Question on Multiple Document Interfaces

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-08-23 at 14:18, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 03:06:02PM +0200, Michele Campeotto wrote:
> > Daniel Borgmann wrote:
> > >Isn't the tab grouping of fluxbox pretty close to that? I didn't use
> 
> Every window manager I've tried that had or could have tab groups I found
> to be deficient in its implementation of them or in other ways. This may
> be because I tried them in early development, because of bad defaults, or
> because nobody has spent much time looking at how to make them usable.
> 
> Nonetheless, I believe the window manager should handle tab grouping for
> the same reasons Matthew Thomas, Colin Robertson, and others have stated.

So before you begin ripping functionality out of apps that have it, what
is your proposal for how the window manager should work? We should not
be denigrating the least-bad option until we've got a better one to use.
At this point, we don't have it. If we do have it at some point, I'll be
the first to encourage the death of tabs- but we certainly don't have it
now, and I don't see anyone working on it or even proposing how it would
work. Until we have a concrete WM proposal to replace the tabs that
/work/ in our applications, users will demand[1] and authors should
provide MDI (when appropriate.)

> I was going to present a scheme for an IDE without MDI, window clutter,
> or screen clutter, but it would add too much to this email.

Are you implying that it will be hundreds of years before someone proves
that such a thing exists? :)[2]

Luis

[1]See for example all the recent Big Media reviews of Netscape 7 and
Moz 1.0 praising tabs and saying it was moz's biggest advantage over IE.

[2]http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/