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On Wednesday 20 January 2010 21:01:47 pk wrote: |
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> BRM wrote: |
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> > The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless |
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> > you are debugging the UI or the program itself. |
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> > |
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> > While a UI is important; a good UI is key. |
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> |
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> And a plain text editor is, imo, a good UI; everybody knows how to use |
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> it. Why bring in another extra (translation) layer? |
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Another layer can be good, if properly abstracted. A good example is KDE's |
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popups when you plug in a hotswap storage device. You get a context-sensitive |
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popup asking you what you want to do and the choices are sane. You say what |
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you want to do and don't worry about the implementation. This is good. |
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XML OTOH was designed for a very specific purpose, and what hal does is not |
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it. Too many UIs for things like this take the exact same info in the file, |
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shuffle it around a bit, display some bits in green and other bits in red, and |
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then try and proclaim that this is a VeryGoodThing(tm). |
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But I've been around a long time and by now have a finely honed bullshit |
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detector. It rings alarm bells when I look at the implementation of hal (but |
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not the idea of hal). |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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