Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!rws
From: rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Application resource file etiquette
Message-ID: <9010071359.AA10100@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 7 Oct 90 13:59:37 GMT
References: <69404@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Sender: root@athena.mit.edu (Wizard A. Root)
Organization: The Internet
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    Personally I can hardly wait for the Simple And Elegant solution Bob has
    promised us. :-) :-)

I said simple, not necessarily elegant. :-)  One of the things I'm concerned
about is backwards compatibility: is it possible to introduce "customization"
features into R5 while still permitting an R4 executable to share the same
resource file (whether app-defaults or .Xdefaults).  This seems important to
me (although others might disagree), and it's what argues against syntactic
changes such as altering color names, and a previous (unrelated) suggestion
about adding grouping mechanisms for resources.

On the subject of colon vs. slash, be warned that in R5 there may well be
a convention for "color space" prefixes in names, e.g. "rgb:444" instead
of "#444" (old syntax still supported, of course), with multiple spaces
supported.