fd.o HIG

[Sean Middleditch]

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 11:20 -0700, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
> 
> 
> > Even documenting that we have no agreement would be
> > a useful start - at least 
> > people won't wander into areas of controversy
> > without any warning.
> 
> 
> Right. I believe I already mentioned that before. We
> can document that kde and gnome have disagreed on this
> x and y and explain the possible ways in which
> developers can handle this along with each of these
> projects rationales as notes. Anybody willing to work
> towards creating such a HIG?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - this is a waste of time.
The differences between KDE and GNOME are huge.  What about other
desktop environments, like ROX?  GNUStep?  Are you going to include the
Aqua HIG and Windows Style Guidelines as well?  What is your target?
Just a document that is a compare and contrast between KDE and GNOME?
That's fairly useless.  There are far more desktops of interest than KDE
and GNOME.

Apps should not try to be desktop agnostic.  Doing so is just going to
result in Frankenstein apps.  There are no technical measures to avoid
this.  The absolute best solution for any application to pick is similar
to what AbiWord does - provide multiple front-ends for each desktop
system they target.  For apps that don't want to target multiple UNIX
desktops (GNUStep, ROX, KDE, GNOME, etc.) they should just pick one and
follow its guidelines 100%, not to mention integrate with it deeply (VFS
layer, etc).

A FDo could only ever hope to provide a LCD (least common denominator)
situation, and given the number of Free Desktops, that would result in
practically nothing.  Any such document should serve mostly to encourage
using an actual desktop system (versus inventing your own monster, a la
Mozilla or OpenOffice.org) and preaching pluggable-UIs (like Abiword)
over trying to make a one-size-sorta-almost-not-really-fits-all
solution.

> 
> regards
> Rahul Sundaram
> 
> 
> 		
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.