On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 1:43 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> wrote:
Pavel, since i am potential user of Spec, i would like to know more details. I know it takes more time to explain what exactly you don't like and propose better alternative, instead of just generic "i don't like it".
Well, some points: - bindings management. Currently if you want to use different binding/platform, you have to specify it for every single widget. It doesn't use platform of the parent. Notice that I had to create own binding even in case I wanted to use smaller font for lists or iconic buttons. - bindings extensions. Imagine the situation when you want to use some special widget in Morphic, let's say some new button type. Currently you create own binding class. But in case that you will want to use something different from Morphic (eg. HTML) you are in trouble because you already used custom binding mechanism for extension of set of the widgets, not for UI framework independence. Spec should provide a way how to offer both - UI independence and widgets extensibility (with fallback mechanism in case that the special widget has no implementation in the currently used UI - in our case a normal button would be used). - layout management. The layout management is taken directly from Morphic. Imagine you should create a HTML binding. Direct ratios and size values!!! are used everywhere. Why to specify how thick a bar with buttons should be? Widgets should know their own optimal size. Look at our current retina display issues. Flex mechanism from XUL is quite nice here (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XUL_Tutorial/Using_Spacers). - Morphic... look at Nautilus (eg. buildMiddlePlugins message) how Spec based tool must look now.
OmniBrowser is older than Spec, so it is not a big surprise that it has more backends implemented.
Now, if we don't want Ben's effort to be wasted, we should do a little bit more than just stating "this is not what i want". It is in our best interests to make it what we want.
I attempted to extend/improve toolbuilder once.. as well as implement own UI layer on top of it.. I found it quite limited (very small set of widgets, very coarse control over them), no way extending widget sets, composition etc.
I think Spec was initially planned to address those issues. While i did not took part in this project directly, i know that Stef (and others) were discussing deeply design of Spec with Ben were quite serious about it and were putting certain goals to achieve. So, if what we got is not something that we want, perhaps we should help fixing it before it's too late :) We both know that "successfull" project is not the one which just finished , launched and just works, but the one which has many users and they enjoy using it and help improving it.
As I already told, for Spec would be very benefical to create at least HTML backend in parallel to the Morphic one. Cheers, -- Pavel
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.