unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Joern Konopka <cldx3000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi  everybody,
> first off, let me just clarify what Dylan said for Frederik:
> "Are you saying that e.g. Firefox should have a seperate, different sidebar
> for each tab that is open? Please apply your theory to how Firefox should
> rather handle tabs in your vision.."
> I don't mean to steal Dylan's explanation and please correct me if i
> explained anything wrong since i of course want to understand better
> myself;)
> All he meant was that if an Application utilizes a GTKNotebook Widget for
> Tabs that could as well be interpreted as top-level Windows, those
> Applications should utilize a new type of Widget to expose the toplevel
> treatment of the Tabs to the system to distinguish it from Applications that
> use the GTKNotebook Widget for content that cannot stand on its own two
> feet, for example the Icons Tab in the Appearance Settings. The look and
> feel of the Tabs should remain the same, the true advantages are laid out on
> the Backend and will make it easier to adopt special treatments for Tabs
> where those are demanded.
>


Aha, well put. Thanks, Joern. Don't worry Frederik; looking back at my
ramble, it's insanely convoluted and I doubt there are many who walk
this Earth who could have understood it.

I'm always on about semantic accuracy and not separating meaning from content :)
I do think such a widget could do with different visuals, too. Beyond
semantics, we're using the same visual metaphor for two different
things. And there ARE two cases here: tabs that the user controls,
which replace toplevel windows; and tabs that are inherently present,
regular bits of a UI just as buttons and text boxes.


Bye,
Dylan