new thread! new thread!

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

(sorry, I ended up writing this to myself and I can't find the message
it was in response to)

> > 8) The HTML Viewer should not be in the main section. In fact, it
should
> > use GTK+ font preferences
> > by default, and probably shouldn't exist at all. How can the user
know
> > what changing "HTML viewer"
> > will change? It probably won't change their web browser, but it'll
> > change applications like 
> > Evolution. That's an archane technical detail, don't expose it. Its
ok
> > if we find a more
> > general way to express this that controls other similar text (not
just
> > GtkHTML text) and have
> > a central place to set fonts.
> 
> In web browsers it's often useful to set the font to something other
> than the system default. I typically use a larger font. Perhaps there
> could be a "web browser font" setting with other font preferences, and
> maybe we could even make some attempt to get Mozilla / Netscape 6 to
> obey it. I agree it's not worth a top-level control panel though.

Yes, I agree that you want control over the fonts in your web browser.
The problem is that most of the places the "html viewer" is used is in
applications like RedCarpet or Evolution where they aren't really a web
browser. When GtkHTML is used to make interfaces (a practice I abhor,
but a fact we may have to live with) its not clear to me that changing
the web browser font *should* affect the font size. When GtkHTML is used
in an interface context it should use the GTK font.

Suz and I have been talking over one solution to "Default
Applications"...which is to create an "Applications" category parallel
to "Main". Each general class of application can have an entry e.g. "Web
Browser", "Email", "Text Editor", "Word Processor"... The preferences
contained in these dialogues will control what application to use for
this class (for example, Web Browser might have the choice between
Mozilla, Galeon, Netscape 4, and Encompass, of course omitting
applications which are not installed). Also it will have preferences
which are common to those applications, for example Web Browser might
have proxy settings (probably those should eventually be universal, but
for now I think web browsers and Nautilus are the only applications that
support this), default home page, etc. There are some issues with this,
like making sure applications don't get out of sync with the preference
etc, but at least with GNOME applications this should be feasible
(certainely in the long run).

I think I generally oppose the idea of dumping *all* application
preferences into a Control Center category, preferences for a particular
application should really be in that application itself.

cheers,

-Seth