Hi
From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Beman Dawes
Yes, I agree. As things stand, I use pixels to specify the
At 12:35 PM 3/3/2004, David Turner wrote: padding >around windows and between grid elements. Everything else is auto-sized >and arranged. I think if the implementation provides reasonable >defaults for padding, etc., then there will be no practical problems.
Maybe, maybe not. I've been burned a number of times in the past by pixel defaults for padding, line widths, etc. The defaults were reasonable based on the most common hardware. But some of my customers paid the money for much higher resolution hardware, and the defaults were not good there. Meanwhile another customer did an in-vehicle system with a very lo-res display. Same software. But because the hardware was so different, the usual defaults were useless. Might have been OK if the defaults were somehow tied to the particular device.
Well, yes, that's what I meant. Presumably different hardware implies different back-end library. What seems clear to me at this point is that there should be a mechanism to allow other libraries to modify or extend the implementation on a particular platform. My idea is this: there is currently a shared header file for each platform that basically defines the implementation class. What if that header were available by including, say, <gui/platform.hpp>? It would then be possible, at least on a platform-by-platform basis, to extend the implementation with new widgets. For example, somebody might write an OpenGL widget that interoperates with the GUI library. It would have to be ported to each target platform, but then that's not much worse than the current state of affairs :-). At least there would be an existing framework to hook into, which would be reasonably similar on the different platforms. Regards David Turner