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[Ayatana] Deprecation of the "Window" Metaphor
After thinking back and forth for a while, i would like to start this topic finally, since nobody else seems to have started it yet.
The deprecation of what we agree on calling the "window" metaphor.
We spoke about Model-View-Controller and what that means to a normal human, i.e. using more natural metaphors than abstract technical ones to expose features to the user.
In the thread about the "fileless paradigm", this was the predominant idea.
Now the term window does in little way only reflect what a window actually is.. it is about as imprecise as a conceptual metaphor can be.
I suggest the term got deprecated as from now, we need new ways of talking about content and its representation.
"Window" is an inherited idea, which has been stalling progress in the Free evolution of software for some time now.
What is a window?
We all don't need to go to Wikipedia¹ to find out what a window actually is. Windows are openings, that allow light to pass through when they are closed, objects and sound also, when they are open.
But windows stay where they are, they don't move, they don't disintegrate or turn into icons, and windows most certainly don't disappear when we close them.
While all this can be disputed as "lacking abstraction", i would like to add that the greatest problem with "window" as a metaphor, is that the windows we speak of are not transparent.
The next person who comes up with a concept of how "window" could be interpreted in a GUI fashion might want to consider implementing transparency before all other things, it is what defines a window before everything else.
To remove something simply just like that is of no help usually, one should offer alternatives.
For those who insist on clinging to the "window" metaphor much further, because they see no alternative to it, i offer thinking of what we now call "windows" as "frames", "drawing areas" or "canvases", perhaps "document" or "image" also describe what we talking about here. Especially the word "image" helps to point out, that some content is purely text, and the only reason why it needs a "window" to be displayed usefully, is because the system has no consistent way of displaying raw text to the user. Gedit e.g. is a text editor, and it needs a window, tool :P
I have seen countless websites that would enjoy just "giving" their text to the DE, so that the user's own preferences would govern the fashion of their presentation.
Especially scientific papers and instructional literature does not require having a "window", a "bgcolor" or a particular font.
To sum it all up:
I think we need to start deprecating the term "window" in favour of content itself and a more flexible representation of it.
Web technology has long ago already revealed concepts such as "layer", "frame", "object" and "stream", "area" and "map", most notable throughout earlier html of course also "table", which are much more suitable terms for something that will eventually constrain content in a geometrical and/or temporal way. These should be the points of focus that i can suggest for the most of us to start considering, in my personal opinion that is ;)
nnaji