The springs and struts definitely allowed you to create very powerful UI
layout constraints, but I still have nightmares about adding a spring and
having my widgets fly off to infinity, or of having an inconsistent
constraint loop and trying to disconnect and recreate constraints until
it was fixed. You could tiker with those .vr files for hours and still
not quite get the layout the way you wanted it.

I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Java- and Qt-style layouts
since moving away from Galaxy. True, they are slightly less general /
powerful - for example, since layouts are all based on spatial groupings,
you can't make a widget position itself relative to some widget that is
far away from it - but they are a *lot* simpler to set up and I've never
really run across a case that couldn't be handled with layouts.

-- Conrad


> A guy by the name of Luca Cardelli wrote a paper on constraint-based
> layout when he was working for DEC. Coincidentally, he was working for
> Microsoft when I was pushing springs and struts. Here is his paper:
> [1]http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cardelli93building.html
> Jeff;
> On Wed, 9 Jun 2004 11:09:15 -0400, "Todd W Lainhart"
> <lainhart@...> said:
> > David Charlap <shamino@...> wrote on 06/09/2004 10:15:23
> AM:
> >
> >
> > >
> > > And they wouldn't be able to patent it as their own. (For the
> same
> > > reason Visix couldn't patent it - prior art.)
> > >
> >
> > What was the prior art?
> >
> > -- Todd
>
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