From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/48600 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Simon Josefsson Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: ... and now for something completely different: User Friendliness Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 20:29:23 +0100 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1041535777 25999 80.91.224.249 (2 Jan 2003 19:29:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 19:29:37 +0000 (UTC) Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 18UB26-0006l4-00 for ; Thu, 02 Jan 2003 20:29:34 +0100 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 18UB2E-0006GY-00; Thu, 02 Jan 2003 13:29:42 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Thu, 02 Jan 2003 13:30:35 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (sclp3.sclp.com [66.230.238.2]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id NAA24809 for ; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 13:30:22 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 5770 invoked by alias); 2 Jan 2003 19:29:25 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 5765 invoked from network); 2 Jan 2003 19:29:25 -0000 Original-Received: from 178.230.13.217.in-addr.dgcsystems.net (HELO yxa.extundo.com) (217.13.230.178) by 66.230.238.6 with SMTP; 2 Jan 2003 19:29:25 -0000 Original-Received: from latte.josefsson.org (yxa.extundo.com [217.13.230.178]) (authenticated bits=0) by yxa.extundo.com (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id h02JTNRr015710 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 20:29:23 +0100 Original-To: ding@gnus.org Mail-Copies-To: nobody X-Payment: hashcash 1.1 0:030102:ding@gnus.org:995b5321471c23a1 X-Hashcash: 0:030102:ding@gnus.org:995b5321471c23a1 In-Reply-To: (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen's message of "Thu, 02 Jan 2003 08:37:20 +0100") User-Agent: Gnus/5.090008 (Oort Gnus v0.08) Emacs/21.2 (i386-debian-linux-gnu) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:48600 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:48600 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen 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.)