[GUI] RFC: CGA-Example 1.2 stuff

[Glynn Clements]

Axel Simon wrote:

> > My other point is that, when a trade-off has to be made between
> > portability and native-ness, it should be up to the application
> > programmer as to which aspect wins. If the CGA ends up forcing a
> > particular set of compromises onto the application, the first time
> > that a developer is unable to accept those compromises they will end
> > up writing their own UI library (and, in the process, reducing the CGA
> > to being just another UI library; it's only *the* UI library if we
> > don't need any others).
> 
> Yes, we shouldn't stand in the way of using the native backend's 
> functions. But we have to make a decision on the core functionality, or 
> don't you think so?

Enough functionality has to be specified for the CGA to be usable, but
it's possible to leave some things unspecified. In fact, it's almost
inevitable that some things will be unspecified; I don't think that
it's possible to specify the semantics so thoroughly that a CGA
program simply could not tell which backend was in use.

> Our aim is that an application written just with the CGA should work with 
> all backends.

I would aim slightly lower: it should be possible to write
applications which work on all backends; I don't think that we need to
go so far as to support the converse: that it's impossible to write an
application which doesn't work on all backends.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net>