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General Overview. | |
What - A replacement for VID's layout scheme.
Glayout is a complement to VID which is basically a style sheet which adds MANY concepts to VID itself.
It is a much smarter layout tool and is concerned about every control and region's needs with regards to its neighbors.
How - Just use vid blocks, but nest them by using hierarchical group styles.
Glayout uses VID blocks to set itself up, as usual, with the distinction that parts of the block are nested within others, just like you nest if statements.
Each level of a glass spec tree is contained in a face which supports dynamic layout.
This means that at any moment, you can re-layout a subset of a view without needing to rebuild it explicitely. just adjust the size of a window and all faces will adapt in size and will even resize the window, if you've made it smaller than the minimum size it needs.
Why - Rebol needs a better layout engine.
Glayout fills a major hole in rebol interface design and when people start using it, they will be addicted, for sure.
I needed a better layout engine to create my own apps. I consider static layout to be obsolete in 2004, so I checked out other rebol dynamic tools and saw that they where using older frame based schemes. Not very intuitive to use and they change the actual dialect and how you setup your individual controls.
I'll continue by saying that glayout is a subset of a bigger tool which used to be my pride and joy, GLASS. That project was put on hold a while back, and a few efforts to put it back on the table have failed. Mainly because it is at a stage where it needs a 100% rewrite, and because that means updating 300k of code.
Glayout is the first step towards a new and release-level GLASS. It is basically a revised (and much improved) glass layout engine, but without any glass-specific engine support. Glayout is basically one little part of glass, for which you can write VID stylesheets as usual.
GLASS stuff like dynamic locale, dynamic skin change, and more is not supported in glayout. These will come with glass, eventually...
last updated: 16-Sep-2004/2:48:01-4:00
