On Thursday 15 August 2002 11:40 am, Göran Hultgren wrote:
> My personal view is that of all the layout mechanisms I have tried:
>
> - VWs GUI builder with relative, absolute
> can't-remember-exactly-but-it-involved-trial-and-error model

This is the same as the ProportionalLayout in Squeak (minus the GUI 
Builder, of course).

> - The box model from TeX (used in Swing and other frameworks). In
> Swing they really messed things up with alignments, max/min and the
> layoutmanager... - Javas freaky default layoutmodels (can't
> remember their names even)

> - The VisualAge Smalltalk model where
> you could relate edges to each other regardless of their place in
> the container hierarchy
>
> I must say the latest was the only one that delivered consistently
> what I tried to achieve. That model was also reimplemented by a
> collegue and used with pleasure in Java.

And then there's GTK's box and spring method (is this like the Swing 
one?): everything is inside (possibly nested) vertical or horizontal 
boxes, and spacing inside the boxes is done by various kinds of 
spacers, including different kinds of springs and fixed-size spacers.

Of course, this doesn't let you relate things in different boxes to 
each other easily, but it is simple for a GUI builder and is also 
simple to understand.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
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