On Monday 12 March 2001 11:27 pm, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> Unfortunately reality has prooven both of you wrong.
> People want tabbed MDI. People want Emacs-Style-MDI. Some People
> want SDI. 

Some people even want Windows.  Fortunately, KDE isn't in a popularity 
contest. :-)  (yes, I know that one sentence has the potential to start a 
50-message thread.. so let's argue that only after we finish this one)

> Of course you can go and tell that your great XDI is
> the solution to the world's problems. The only thing you'll gain by this
> is that people will not care about you and implement YDI. Even worse:
> There are more people who will implement YDI. But due to the fact that
> there is no official YDI everyone implements YDI differently. In each
> application YDI will use different code, it will use different controls
> and therefore it will make the desktop feel more inconsistent.
> This is the thing that happened during the last 16 months.

Choosing what is right to make the desktop work best is what we should 
strive for.  Making things configurable whenver there is an argument isn't 
the solution.  At this point it'd be nice to do some research and come to 
a decision about which more efficient, simple, and adaptable.  If it can 
be shown that MDI is inferior, then  KDE shouldn't keep support for it in 
the libs.

I think SDI as the standard or default model makes the most sense, 
especially for people not familiar with how computers work.  People work 
on projects and documents, they don't use apps.  Ever notice that a lot of 
software aimed at average people gets names like "Calendar Creator" or 
"Family Tree Printer"?  People are focused on their documents.

SDI allows people to remain focused on their documents.  When they click 
on KWord document X, then document X will appear.  Likewise if he's 
already in KWord and hits file->open.  SDI gives simplicity and 
consistency.

Compare with MDI.  File->open will open a child window of the app window, 
so now the old document is next to the new one, and somehow tied to it.  
Why should the be related?  Will hitting file->save cause the two to be 
saved together?  Who knows?

With MDI, Clicking on a document in Konq could do one of two things: it 
could open a child window of a pre-existing MDI window, or it could create 
 a new parent window.  So one way you force the two documents to be linked 
togehter, or you create inconsistency with file->open.  And in both cases 
you end up inconsistent with opening a document in an SDI app.

Yess, being consistent with SDI is important. My understanding of KDE is 
that one of the founding goals was for things to be consistent across 
apps, not just within apps.

> Basically three "modes" turned out to be viable solutions:
>
> - Emacs-Style MDI
> - tabbed MDI
> - SDI

Where would you categorize an app like Gimp, Pixie, or KSirc in default 
mode?  Controlled SDI fits into none of those categories.

-- 
Neil Stevens
multivac@fcmail.com
neil@qualityassistant.com

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