Resource Files (Was: Re: [GUI] More points for the technical discussion)

Axel Simon A.Simon@ukc.ac.uk
Mon, 17 Feb 2003 10:03:55 +0000


On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 06:40:44PM -0700, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
> On Sunday 16 February 2003 03:25 pm, Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
> >
> > Agreed. However, the general consensus (correct me if I'm wrong) seems
> > to be that we shouldn't use platform-specific resource files.
> > When we have an API for programmatical creation of the UI, we can
> > implement a library for  platform-independent resource files on top of
> > that.
> 
> I would phrase it slightly differently.  We should have a platform-independent 
> API related to resources, which in some cases may use underlying capabilities 
> of the target O/S.

I definitely agree to that. IMHO it is very important to use the toolkit's 
capability to custumize and internationalize the application. Every 
platform has it, Windows has .rc files, Gtk has style files and Apple has 
its functionality. If we don't make use of these facilities we wind up 
writing a toy (educational) API where you have 6 color constants and 3 
font constants and use them blindly.

Axel.