On Wednesday 03 March 2004 12:35 pm, David Turner wrote:
10. It should not attempt to provide its own abstraction of 2D graphics. Some level of portable graphics capability would certainly be necessary but it should be kept to a minimum (your requirement #1 supports this I believe). A portable 2D graphics API is worthy of its own library.
I've been thinking about that. On the one hand, you Really Need a drawing-area widget, but on the other hand, it just about doubles the size of the library. I like your way of thinking, but how to integrate this unnamed graphics API nicely with the gui library? There should be implementation-dependent hooks for this.
IMHO, this need not be in the GUI library to start with so long as it's clear that it can be added. A GUI library, just like a Sockets or XML library, is a huge undertaking. Many libraries addressing these areas have been started, but have not been finished due to "planned feature bloat", i.e., the authors and reviewers wanted too much out of the first version of the libraries. Don't be afraid to say "that's version 2" to a feature; bonus points if you have a paragraph or two in a "Future Directions" document that explains how such a feature fits into the library. Doug