Re: Some somewhat cooler thoughts...

[Gregory Casamento]

Adam,

--- Adam Fedor <fedor@doc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Gregory Casamento wrote:
> 
> > 
> > The cons as I see them are:
> > 1) .gsmarkup currently cannot express the same information as a .gorm file.
> > 2) GUIs created using .gsmarkup on one platform may not look as intended
> even
> > with the "autoformatting" capabilities which Renaissance provides.   
> > 3) The intelligent layout, in this case, will stand in the way of making it
> > look good on all platforms since changes on one may adversly effect the
> look on
> > another.
> > 4) The intelligent layout (GSVBox and GSHBox) features will be somewhat
> > restrictive.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I think of Renaissance as being two parts, one that encodes the 
> interface and one that displays it. These two aspects COULD be 
> completely separate (although they aren't right now, I don't think that 
> is a big issue).  What I like the most is that the encoding part is very 
> simple and very flexible, and perhaps more than anything else, it's 
> human readable. Having recently attempted to port an old app from 
> NeXTstep, I can say having human readable files could have saved me days 
> of time trying to convert old, obsolete, and broken TypedStream files 
> and nibs. I think, probably being accutely aware of the fact that more 
> and more computer data is becoming unreadable because machines/software 
> no longer exists to read it - GNU and the GPL prefer formats that are 
> easily editable - that is a great advantage.

I partially agree, the problem as I see it, though, is that the two systems
(MOSX/OPENSTEP and GNUstep) are incompatible when it comes to encoding *in
general*.   If we use an open, human readable encoding format in NSCoder, that
might help in the general case. 

This would mean that, since gorm files use the encoding model, that they would
become human readable XML files or plists (whichever) and so would anything
using a class which uses NSCoder to encode itself.

> P.S. I think gmodel files are obsolete. So that only leaves gorm and 
> gsmarkup, which is not that bad...

I think that gmodel files can still serve as a way of porting apps from
OPENSTEP and MOSX which use nib files.  But, I also believe that they
eventually should go away.

Later,

=====
Gregory John Casamento
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