Re: XML front-end ideas

[Andreas Pour <pour mieterra com>]

David Nusinow wrote:
> 
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> On Sunday 20 May 2001 04:23 pm, you wrote:
> > I think the XML front end idea may have merit, but we may be getting
> > overly-complex in our solution to the problem. I'll have to think about it.
> >
> > If we were to do the front end in XML, what does everyone think here about
> > having that XML be XUL (Mozilla) syntax-based? They've already done a ton
> > of work in getting an XML-GUI language and I think we may be able to
> > leverage a lot of that. In addition, that may allow for a Mozilla-based web
> > interface to be constructed easier in the future.
> 
> I personally don't see any point to the XML frontend. We don't really need
> for everything to be identical, 

Hi,

I think identical means supportable.  If you don't need service
providers to support Linux, then yes, identical is not important (even
though IMHO it would still be easie to make it identical).  Remember,
there are a large number of users who can't figure out the reason their
monitor doesn't turn on is b/c it is unplugged!  Having tech support
walk these people through stuff means they have to be able to provide
clear and precise instructions on what to do.  

When people say Linux is hard to use it's b/c it is not possible to give
someone clear and unambiguous instructions on how to do something. 
Having that be possible means Linux can go mainstream.  I kinda thought
that was the point of this project ;-).

> and if you do want your frontend identical,
> just copy the one you want it to be identical to (open up Qt designer and
> with the Gnome frontend on the next desktop just start redesigning it).

That takes a lot of work, for each toolkit.  Using XML GUI it's **0**
work for each new dialog.  Even if you use Qt Designer, you have to
hand-roll some code, get it to compile and be bug-free, and then find
somewhere a copy of Caldera/Debian/Mandrake/RedHat/SuSE/etc., each in
about 4-5 different versions, to compile it on that.  Hmm, the XML GUI
stuff starts looking like a lost less code and a lot less work :-).

> This
> really just adds more XML to parse, thereby slowing down the frontend
> needlessly. 

Do you have any idea how fast parsing XML is?  It's string based.  It
probably takes longer to draw one word of text on the screen then to
parse the entire XML for a complex dialog.

> Even if it doesn't wind up slowing it down, it adds code that
> really doesn't need to be there and winds up sucking up time that could be
> spent improving backends or adding new ones.

Hmm, I don't think it takes much code to generate XML on the backside. 
As to sucking up time, nothing will suck up more time than having each
toolkit implement an entire dialog for each item added to the backend. 
Each team needs to think about the layout and implement it.  I.e., using
XML scales really well to different toolkits and different configuration
modules; just sending data doesn't scale at all.

Ciao,

Dre