Re: [e4-dev] Declarative UI in E4

[Kevin McGuire <Kevin_McGuire@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Yves,

> For my perspective, CSS relies on UI model which is not 100% compatible
> with SWT, and it is designed to meet for a simple Web page style,
not for
> RIA.
>
> For the first reason, as Tom and Kevin said, we cannot support 100%
CSS.
> For the second reason, we cannot be limited by CSS either. 

That's well said.

> To bypass the
> limitation of CSS, we need another concept.
> 
> In XWT, we have started to implement the XAML style.
> 
> There is another powerful concept in XAML, which is in fact part of
the UI
> styling: Control template. A control template can override an existing
UI
> type. For example, if we define a Control template as Button somewhere
in
> a structure tree, all buttons under the tree will use this control,
> instead of the SWT standard's.

I think there are various levels of solution depending
on what our goals are. My starting goals are relatively modest, which is
to make it easier to style what we have, and to be able to style the widgets
a bit more. CSS just happens to be an existing well known format for doing
the former. I think it also raises our expectations of what our UIs should
look like, which is healthy, and pushes on the second point. 

What you're describing is even more advanced, but
I think we could do the same with a declarative model in conjunction with
CSS, no?  Granted XAML has a certain elegance in combining the two.
Then again, we're going to be able to something similar with the modelled
workbench, so at the part level but not the individual widget level. I'm
not sure control level replacement is a problem we're in search of a solution,
is it?

Kevin