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Date:      Wed, 18 Dec 1996 12:44:26 -0800
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
To:        Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk>
Cc:        Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>, hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: text, menu/dialog/windowing, library, ideas? 
Message-ID:  <6086.850941866@time.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "02 Dec 1996 13:00:21 GMT." <57ybfht82i.fsf@tees.elsevier.co.uk> 

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> libforms had this working. Objects inherited properties of the parent so
> you could create a box object that encapsulated a border drawing widget
> and a label widget etc.

Yeah, I remember the data structures looked clean enough, we just
never got anything working below it well enough to give it any actual
degree of usability for anything. :-(

> On the html front, html is not a good way to go about this. You could
> not do what you did with libdialog using html. Don't fall into the
> trap of believing html is a display language, at heart it's SGML but
> with bells and whistles thrown in by some browser developers. It's a
> really naff way to spec a user interface.

I've come to the same conclusion.  I'm not saying that HTML driven
interfaces won't somewhere come into play anyway (since there are
people actually working on that), but if they do tie an HTML browser
into this system administration tool then it definitely shouldn't be
through pretending to be just another GUI abstraction.  The CGI stuff
can simply call the CLI commands.

> Hmm, if you still want something like this I'd be interested in
> digging it up again. It already had all the infrastructure, the things
> it was lacking were widgets for different display classes. It's been
> on my list of future projects anyway to dig it up and finish it off as
> libpui (portable user interface).

I'm always happy to look at stuff.. :-)

						Jordan



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