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From: nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: MOTIF vs Athena. Practical to conditionalize?
Message-ID: <1990Dec15.174043.5534@alphalpha.com>
Date: 15 Dec 90 17:40:43 GMT
References: <3132@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <7036@mitech.com> <3165@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <1990Dec14.164540@ap.co.umist.ac.uk>
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In article <1990Dec14.164540@ap.co.umist.ac.uk> jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) writes:
>If you use the Widget Layout Manager from the Xcu toolkit, you are able to
>migrate from one toolkit to another. This is because the widget tree is
>described in a config file rather than the actual source, and also the config
>file can cope with first level ``callback handling''. Whether the toggle
>widgets are under one parent or spread out is thus in the config file, and not
>in the program itself. The program is thus ``reduced'' to providing the
>main functions of the application, and it would appear that most functions can
>be written in ways that are independent of the widget set.

Sure, if you don't want to take full advantage of the toolkit, don't
care about having an efficient application and don't worry about
being style-guide compliant and/or easy to use.

I need to do stuff like ensure that I can tab out of a multi-line
text widget and go to the next field if the text widget is readonly.
Or create a cascade menu without a label where the I override Motif's
menu history functionality.  Or create a popup where there is one popup
for the entire application, but which items are sensitive depend
on which item you popped up over.  Or dynamically create the correct
types of widgets on the fly in a mail reader window as you view messages
that contain different kinds of enclosures (forwarded messages, text,
Frame documents, GIF files...).  And of course the menubar layout needs
to conform to Motif, with the help menu off on the right, so I have
to tell it which pulldown is the help pulldown.  And there are some
quirks in layout of paned windows, so it's critical that I manage the
paned window (and its parents) before I add the children.  And then
there are dialog boxes that have text fields, where I need to tell the
toolkit which text field should have the initial focus, or need to
make sure that the initial text in the field is pre-selected, so when
the user starts typing it gets replaced.  And then there's the
Xerox-style hierarchical folder browser where I need to shift all of
the contents of three scrolling lists quickly to the right or to the left
as the user moves around through the folder hierarchy.

Of course I didn't *need* to do all of that stuff - but I wouldn't
have a good interface if I didn't.  Sure, I can abstract some of it
for my application - but I can't just casually use some UIMS,
higher-level toolkit or layout manager and automagically switch widget
sets.  I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm still waiting.

						-kee
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I'm not sure which upsets me more; that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.