Re: [Usability] How many tabbed MDIs does GNOME have?

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 03:41:51AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="David Adam Bordoley">
> 
> > >Gnumeric (sheets are totally tabs, though it's really sub-doc MDI) 
> > 
> > Tabs in the case of gnumeric do not count as MDI because they are part of
> > a single document (file, object choose your terminology). 
> 
> You're confusing context with interface. It's tabbed MDI, the documents just
> happen to be understood (by us) as subdocuments. . . .

It's not tabbed MDI, but not because of being a single file. Indeed, it may
not be a single file at all. It seems that an inserted image does not get
added to the .gnumeric file.

There's only one document, the spreadsheet, which has many interconnected
pages. You may have, for example, the months of the year on the first 12
pages, then a summary on the 13th. That summary could be bound to the other
pages by functions - e.g., in cell Summary!A1, =Jan!A1+Feb!A1+...

The pages are understood by gnumeric (not just by us) to be part of a
single document and there are affordances which would not exist if they
were seperate documents.

Compare an html editor, a webpage editor, and a website editor. The html
editor works on just one .html file and will have functions convenient to
working on that like automatic tag closing. A webpage editor will have all
that an html editor has, but probably a WYSIWYG interface and a way to
manipulate the style sheet of the page. A website editor will have all that
a webpage editor has and then a way to provide comment content and connections
between pages - e.g., it a page name changes, it could update the links to
it on other pages.

If the html editor shows two .html files in the same window, it's MDI. For
an html editor, a single .html file is a complete document. Being so limited,
it may not seem like a useful program, but, if someone wrote a really good
one, it might be a component of a page or site editor. Nobody's work has to
be in vain because he choose a simple program instead of the complex site
editor.

A web page editor might show many .html files because a frame set can be
regarded as a single page. That's pushing on becoming a site editor, so
let's stipulate that page editors don't do frames. Still, a page editor
manipulates items which may be documents in their own ways; such as a .css
file and an image file. Whether or not it's MDI depends on how the interface
is made. Example: if it's WYSIWYG and the stylesheet is changed when the
user changes a line of text to bold, that's not MDI; If the html and css just
happen to be in the same window, with no interconnection, that is MDI.

If the (no frames) web page editor window contained multiple pages
connected by no more than an anchor, it would be MDI. If the connection
between pages were LINK tags in the header, but the page editor didn't
provide functions - didn't afford - doing anything with those, it would be
MDI. If it did afford some LINK tag interconnections, it would probably
be a site or book editor.

For a website editor, the "document" would be all the interconnected pages,
and each page may be some html, css, and image files. If the website editor
let you work on two or more different sites - say, microsoft.com and
gnome.org - then it would be clearly be MDI. If it didn't connect the pages -
e.g., by updating all the page views when the stylesheet changes - then it
would still be MDI.

I hope to address this and more in the model and design documents I'm
working on.

Thanks for including Gnumeric as tabbed MDI because doing so has indicated
difference between what this HIG developer meant and what was understood.

Cheers,
Greg


P.S. - Lately I've been so much under the weather that I'm now physically
       ill.  I meant to say more here, but I'm not up to it right now.
       Future replies may be quite delayed.