[openbox] theme question

John Russell drjimmy42 at yahoo.com
Tue Jan 20 13:12:26 EST 2004


On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 13:03, Jesper Louis Andersen wrote:
> Quoting Mikael Magnusson (mangosoft at comhem.se):
> 
> > There was some talk of this a while back but it was decided against for 
> > various reasons (ie, i don't remember why :)
> 
> The removal of XML from Openbox would be welcome to me. The problem is
> that the XML is really just an AST which can be provided by a simple
> yacc grammar and give much easier configuration files to edit (by hand).

An easy configuration file in a format which would need to be explained,
regardless of how simple it was.  At least xml is something that people
are getting used to seeing.  Its just as easy as anything else you are
going to come up with and it is becoming/has become the standard for
configuration.  I think that if nothing else, the theme format should be
moved to xml.  

What I was thinking before I read the design document about engines, was
that the metacity xml format could be used.   My original idea when
starting this thread was that metacity has far more flexible theming
than ob.  Everyone says they like the simple themes. That may be great,
but you could also have the _option_ of having cool _shaped_ themes.  I
know this would require a lot of change in the way themes are done, but
I think it would be amazingly cool. It would also provide the ability to
use metacity themes, of which there are thousands, and you still have
the ability to have simple ob style themes because it is flexible.  

I know I'm going to get a lot of shit for this, but just think about it
slowly before responding in an irate manner.  I think it makes sense.


Just a thought.  

John

> Using the same grammar file for obConf would not complicate it that
> much. Especially not if a tree-walking algorihtm was made to make
> changes to the file. That way the file would keep its structure. My bet
> is that it is maximally 500 lines of C and it would remove the ugly
> dependency on libxml2. Oh, well...
-- 
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.




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