Look and Feel... a red herring (Re: UNIX Expo in NYC)

[Chris Calabrese[rs]]

In article <2113 at ficc.uu.net>, peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> In article <10794 at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>, I write:
> > Personally, my view is this:  what the industry needs to rally
> > behind is one single Look and Feel.  This does not mean one
> > toolkit.
> 
> I think the industry needs to establish a subset toolkit that does all
> the basic things (opening a window, getting events, rendering text and
> graphics, defining menus (in broad terms), poke points (gadgets, radio
> buttons, what have you), scroll bars, and so on) reasonably well. The
> equivalent of curses for window systems, if you like.

You mean like the CORE project?  Of course CORE locks you into
X (I'm using NeWS, and not just because it's more fun :-), but
such a toolkit could be made window system independant (like Interviews).

As a programmer, I think your idea is great (and not that difficult
to implement, either).  As a user, I like all my windows
to have the _same_ look and feel.  Of course, one would
assume that each hardware vendor would implement their own look and feel
which the user would get used to quickly, however, in any given day,
I use hardware from Sun, AT&T, HP, and Convergent.

The ideal solution is to have a core window toolkit with a
standard look and feel which is user modifyable (at runtime!).
This way, each vendor could supply their own standard runtime
modifier script, and the user could have their own personal
one (/etc/ui and .uirc?).
One of the reasons I run NeWS is that I can do this with PostScript
code at runtime, and without needing access to expensive source
(although I do have such access :-), only to examples which
float around on the net.
-- 
	Christopher J. Calabrese
	AT&T Bell Laboratories
	att!ulysses!cjc		cjc at ulysses.att.com