While many people frown on MDI, it is useful in some places, as demonstrated
with several of the GNOME programs.

My favorite example of this is X-Chat. It's wonderful MDI tab based
interface, makes it easy to have a half of dozen different channels open at
the same time, yet be easy to switch from Window to Window. Using separate
Windows for each one just wastes screen space. Most popular graphical
spreadsheets use the same method to switch between sheets. Even some simple
text editors benefit from such a thing.

GNOME lets you also (at least in the future) set (well at least some)
applications up so that they can also optionally use a traditional SDI. This
is great when it comes to being flexible and adapting to the users needs.

qt-1.x/KDE 1.x does have a good tab-based MDI, such an example can be seen
in most KDE apps -- take a look at the Preference Window of these
Applications. Most users instantly recognize the tab-based Windows, since so
many dialogs (is that word I want?) already contain them -- although they
don't usually contain document editing things.

*which is IMHO the most intuitive MDI interface available, since it clearly
indicates what is open, it makes each pane look integrated into the
application, and is familiar to anybody that has ever used MS Windows or a
Mac OS app.

Take a look at these pages for some interesting look at how the GNOME team
deals with MDI(especially X-Chat and Numeric Screenshots), and other
problems they are/have tackling/tackled:

http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-ui/hitsquad/
http://www.gnome.org/screenshots/


Thanks,

Andrew B. Arthur       |http://members.global2000.net/~arthur99
arthur99@global2000.net|http://linuxonline.org
(G)AIM: AArthur PPC    |http://osonline.org/mac