Re: ... and now for something completely different: User Friendliness

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> So we come back to these questions: What language should these
> configuration santas be written in, and what should be used to render
> the user interface?
>
> Now, the most obvious thing to do is to just write them in Lisp, and
> I definitely don't want to do that.
>
> (if (string= (getenv "NNTPSERVER") "")
>     (if (query "You don't seem to have set a news server,
> so do you want to use Gnus to read news or mail?")
>          (setq news-server (quert "Ok, then gimme the
> name of the news server"))))
>
> Eek.  It's a readability nightmare.
>
> The same is the case with anything that looks like HTML with embedded
> program statements.  If you write PHP with lots of strings and stuff
> in between, it soon just gets too ugly to be fun.
>
> So -- any good ideas?  Surely somebody must have come up with a nice
> solution here...
>
> The other question is -- how to render the user interface?  Again,
> Customize has lots of stuff for that, and might be a likely
> contender.  The other is HTML and w3.  Any other ideas?

Doesn't GTK have wizards?  If so, then one idea is to use them if they
become accesible from elisp once the core C level GTK support in Emacs
is finished (which are working quite nicely here).

If the user is a newbie, she probably do not want to learn another
wizards GUI first, and considering the widget elisp API available I
fear implementing one now will be rather ugly even after lots of work.
(Compare speedbar and the diff frames, which are nice but rather
non-standardly crafted GUI widgets and at least confused me when I
first tried them.)