Thursday, May 8, 2008

Can we just STOP using fixed coordinates for laying our user interface elements?

What is it with these Windows-people who still use fixed coordinates for laying out user-interfaces?! I thought that would be something that at least would be eradicated when Microsoft released the .NET platform a few years ago, but no. Every other decent UI toolkit (Qt, SWT, Gtk+, and a couple of others) has abandoned fixed coordinates for layout, but Windows people persist. Is there some misguided idea that "we MUST know exactly on the pixel how our user interface looks, and it has to look exactly the same everywhere"?

Yes, user interface layout is a difficult problem, but treating it as a drawing problem is not the solution.

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