Re: Renaissance menus on OS X ?

[Helge Hess]

Nicola Pero wrote:
> Yes - we probably want to have something similar, and all the other stuff
> with conditionals, repetitions etc.  Maybe as an extension or as a
> preprocessing ?
>
> When the .gsmarkup is read, it would first be preprocessed to process the
> var:xxx, generating (internally and invisibly) a plain .gsmarkup which
> would be processed in the usual way by the existing code.  This just for
> simplicity -- we can merge the two processes together at a later stage
> when things are clearer, and the design more definitive.

I'm not sure about this yet, we have two options:
a) like in WO, repetitions, conditions etc are real views
b) preprocessing

Both have advantages. Eg with a) you can do a "[myRep reload]" (or bind 
the repetition using an association) and the subviews would be 
recreated. If we do b) we can only recreate everything. Also a) is the 
"WO-way" (WORepetitions are real "renderer" objects with no representation).

> > I would suggest using "<img src=.../>" and adding a NSURL subclass for 
> > resources (eg gsresource://mainbundle/GNUstep.gif). The src would need 
> > to be relative to the document (gsresource://mainbundle/MyPage.gsmodel) 
> > and we could use "img src="GNUstep.gif".
> > Easy todo with NSURL.
>
> <image name="MyImage" /> will use [NSImage imageNamed: @"MyImage"] as the
> image to display.  That seems the obvious way to start to me: usually when
> you write an application you just put MyImage.png in your application main
> bundle, and [NSImage imageNamed: @"MyImage"] will found it from there
> automatically.

My approach would work exactly the same way for the simple case (since 
the name would be relative to the document source), but would be much 
more powerful when getting images from somewhere else.

IMHO the user designing the gsmodel file shouldn't be required to know 
how an NSImage object is instantiated.

> I suppose using a custom URL format to specify where to find resources
> might be a quite interesting extension.  I suppose that would allow you to
> choose the bundle/framework you want to get the resource from, for example
> ?

Yes, exactly.

> As you say, I suppose we could add a src="..." attribute with a custom
> NSURL as something more advanced than name="..." - we can have both
> name="..." and src="...".  I like src="..." :-) but probably need to think
> a bit about how to design this URL format and have it work.

No. If you load the gsmodel from the bundle, the gsmodel get's assigned 
it's "base-URL" automagically, eg:

  resource://MyBundle.app/MyPanel.gsmodel

now we allow relative URLs *inside* the XML file, eg:

  <img src="MyImage.gif"/>

this would be expanded to:

  resource://MyBundle.app/MyImage.gif

The "name" attribute would be useless since it is already covered by 
using a relative "src" value ?

> I probably need to prepare a list of ideas :-) I can't implement
> everything immediately, and I want to think and discuss a bit before doing
> things (to get them right), but I don't want to loose/forget them in the
> process.  I think I'll add an IDEAS file to Renaissance.

I still plan to make a demo of my ideas (maybe I get something ready to 
FOSDEM). The basic thing I need for my ideas is a working autolayout 
boxes (and of course I have to understand them ;-)

> > > <window class="MyWindow" title="Hello" width="200" height="4000">
> > >  <!-- some views here -->
> > > </window>
> >
> > "class" should be used for CSS ;-) But besides that, yes, IMHO this 
> > would be correct (MyWindow class used in a window "mapping" context).
>
> Do you have another suggestion, instead of calling the attribute 'class' ?  
> It's very intuitive as a name for the attribute.

If we would have a binding file like I explained in the other (private 
;-) mail, we could place the class definition there, eg:

.gsmodel
  <window id="win1">...

.wod
  win1: MyWindow {
    target = "#self";
    ... more bindings ...
  }

This is how things are done in WO, just the layout in .html, all the 
connect things in the .wod.

> I like the idea of CSS, but giving it a serious thought, I'm not sure it's
> actually relevant.  Can you imagine a really useful example ?  I'm frankly
> not sure I can, and the system is so much simpler without them.

CSS is extremly powerful, eg all the theming in Moz is done using CSS. 
But it's also quite difficult to implement and at least for now I would 
leave it out of R.

Greetings
  Helge