Re: [Glade-devel] glade2 discussions

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From: James Henstridge (james@daa.com.au)
Date: Sun Jul 01 2001 - 05:58:48 EDT


On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Chema Celorio wrote:

> I think we should move all the glade2 discussions to the mailing
> list rather than individual mails. This will help other people get
> involved and keep everyone in sync to what the other guys are
> using. If you are not susbscribed please visit :
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/glade-devel .
>
> Can you send a small status report to the list, 2 or 3 lines
> saying what you've been working on ?

Although not directly related to glade2, I may as well give a bit of a
status report on how libglade is going.

- The GladeXML object has been converted to a GObject
- a new SAX parser for the new file format has been integrated. This
  includes switching to libxml2.
- Added a routine for constructing an object using property introspection
  and the g_object_newv function.
- Modified the glade_standard_build_children() function to also handle
  container child properties.
- Added code to register all gtk 2.0 widgets with libglade using the
  standard properties based handlers.
- Started work on a converter to switch to convert old files. It still
  needs a fair amount of work.

To do on the new file format:
- Add a translatable attribute to the <property> element to say whether
  the value of a property should be passed through gettext. This way
  libglade, code generation backends and tools like xml-i18n-tools don't
  miss any strings that should be translated (the decision on what to be
  translated is made in one place).

- change the composite-child="yes|no" attribute of <child> to
  internal-child="name", using a name of the child. This attribute is
  intended to mark widgets that are internal to some other widget, so we
  don't try to reconstruct them when building the interface. The idea is
  that things might look something like:
    <widget class="GtkDialog">
      <child internal-child="vbox">
        <widget class="GtkVBox">
          ...
          <child internal-child="action_area">
            <widget class="GtkHButtonBox">
              ...
            </widget>
          </child>
        </widget>
      </child>
    </widget>
  For libglade, when it encountered an internal child, it would walk up
  the tree until it found the first non internal ancestor, and then call a
  callback to get a reference to the internal child.

- Finish off accessibility properties. Currently there is support for a
  flat set of ATK properties for a widget, although that is not really
  sufficient for some widgets where you want to set properties of "sub"
  AtkObjects that represent components of the widget. We won't be able to
  support all possible customisations, but people can always make their
  changes after the interface has been generated. Need a balance between
  handling all cases, and what sort of interface we can provide for
  editting in glade.

- Maybe add a <tooltip> element under <widget>? Tooltips aren't handled
  through the standard properties interface in gtk, so it is a bit
  inconvenient to have the tooltip interspersed with the other props (we
  already have special elements for accels and signals, so it shouldn't be
  that much of a problem). Alternatively, ask for a "tooltip" property to
  be added to gtk.

Note that Sun (and a large number of users) would really like it if glade
was accessible itself. This includes setting atk properties for widgets
where necessary (eg. set the name of buttons that just have an image in
the toolbox), and having a good set of keybindings (ie. anything you can
do with a mouse should be possible with the keyboard).

To do for libglade itself:
- fix cases where standard handlers don't do the job properly.
- fix up the internal child problem mentioned above
- make sure it works with output of glade2 correctly.

Comments welcome.

James.

-- 
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/

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