Refactoring UI, Skinning, Translating - was: Re: [sldev] sljirastats.com Linden Metrics Report

Felix Duesenburg kfa at gmx.net
Thu Apr 24 03:20:17 PDT 2008


IMHO the xml files are in dire need of refactoring. Should we not do this:

In the XUI files, separate the structure from the skin. Only colors,
text labels, border styles etc. go into the skin overlay. Even that
could again be separated into a style pack and a language pack only
containing the labels and tooltips.

All info necessary to display a widget, its elements and their
positioning, are essential for the program to function at all. In the
current state, it's a nightmare to maintain if you have to adapt all
available skins whenever you want to change or extend some GUI
functionality.

While you could say that the current files simply contain everything to
have a default to fall back on for all elements that a skin or language
pack doesn't contain, it would be a great asset for future skinning or
translation efforts if we had that separated also in the en-us default
version along with the source/release distribution. Then you'd just take
the package with the parts you want to work on and edit away. As it is,
you have to manually (or with a programmatic tool) eliminate all the
info you don't need i.o. to create an overlay.

Am I overlooking some info that a similar plan already exists, either on
the JIRA or elsewhere?

Felix


Kent Quirk (Q Linden) wrote:
> [...]
> To tie in the other discussion going on right now, we're fully aware
> that the viewer isn't as modular as anyone would like, and that
> there's too much coupling between the various pieces. Some of us are
> working very hard on taking some of that apart right now. I, for
> example, am one of three developers who have been working on
> refactoring the notifications and alerts systems, with the help of our
> UI team and some excellent feedback I got earlier from this list.
>
> We're also doing a lot of work toward making the viewer more and more
> data-driven. For example, the Notifications system is quite a bit more
> flexible now, because we're adding capabilities to the XML file we use
> for localization.
> [...]
>     Q
>




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