Look and Feel... a red herring (Re: UNIX Expo in NYC)

[Peter da Silva]

In article <10794 at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>, cjc at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Chris Calabrese[rs]) writes:
> Personally, my view is this:  what the industry needs to rally
> behind is one single Look and Feel.  This does not mean one
> toolkit.

I think the industry needs to establish a subset toolkit that does all
the basic things (opening a window, getting events, rendering text and
graphics, defining menus (in broad terms), poke points (gadgets, radio
buttons, what have you), scroll bars, and so on) reasonably well. The
equivalent of curses for window systems, if you like.

Look-and-feel wars are going to go on as long as the old keyboard wars,
with as much chance of being resolved. I don't give a damn what the look
and feel is... I just want to write a program and have it run.

I have seen references to something called "STDWIN", but don't know what
state it's in or how to find out about it.

I don't want Open Look on my 68000-based PC. To much screen real-estate
is taken up with fluff, and too many machine cycles are going to be needed
for it. On the other hand someone with a 68030 and a huge screen is going
to find Intuition or GEM stark and boring. But there's no reason a program
shouldn't be able to compile and run on all three.
-- 
Peter da Silva  `-_-'  Ferranti International Controls Corporation
"Have you hugged  U  your wolf today?"     uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter
Disclaimer: My typos are my own damn business.   peter at ficc.uu.net