I am fed up with Python GUI toolkits...

[Cameron Simpson]

On 23Jul2011 22:21, Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
| Tim Roberts wrote:
| >Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
| >>sturlamolden wrote:
| >>>Or should modern deskop apps be written with something completely
| >>>different, such as HTML5?
| >>
| >>I hope not! HTML is great for web pages, but not
| >>everything should be a web page.
| >
| >I don't think your glibness is justified.  There is a legitimate appeal to
| >this notion.  The fact is that MANY APIs can be completely and adequately
| >described by HTML.
[...]
| There might be some sense in using something HTML-like to
| describe the layout of widgets in a GUI. But laying out
| widgets is only a tiny part of what's involved in creating
| an application with a GUI. You still need a GUI toolkit to
| provide the widgets being laid out, and application code
| behind that to provide the desired functionality.

Sure, but if a suitable API is presented for javascript to hook into
over HTTP an HTML widget kit isn't an unreasonable thing to build.
And then you have the cross platform nirvana. Except for the browsers'
various differences and bugs etc etc...

| >With style sheets, you can
| >get very complete control over the look and feel.
| 
| CSS is designed for graphic artists who want complete
| control over every aspect of appearance. Again, this is
| (arguably) okay for web pages, but I don't think it
| applies to GUI applications. You *don't* want every
| application looking completely different from every other
| on the whim of the author -- quite the opposite.

You can override site specific CSS in the firefox browser, possibly
others. There are extensions to make it easier rather than mega-awkward
and undocumented. It is still a bit of a dobge, in not small part
because CSS lacks a "not" - you can't say "style everything except
blah", which means you have to enumerate a bazillion combinations and
you're still playing guessing games.

So, yes, the every author's look'n'feel is gratuitously different chaos
still applies :-(

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

But what ... is it good for?
      --Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM,
        1968,  commenting on the microchip.