Developer CD Series 1997 January: Mac OS SDK/Dev.CD Jan 97 SDK2.toast/Development Kits (Disc 2)/OpenDoc Development Framework/ODF-Interest Archive/June 96/Re Dashed lines.4

Internet Message Format | 1996-12-03 | 1.8 KB | [TEXT/ttxt]

Subject:     Re: Dashed lines
Sent:        6/25/96 11:35 AM
Received:    6/25/96 2:52 PM
From:        Kirk Swenson, [e-mail]
Reply-To:    ODF Interest, [e-mail]
To:          OpenDoc Development Framework Discussion List, ODF-Interest@CILabs.

                      RE>Dashed lines                              6/25/96

>        IOW, we've gotta have this partially-baked feature because Windoze
>has it, but we can't have a full-function version because the Redmond
>snoozers only implemented a crippled subset of it?    The restrictions on
>dashes (no curved lines, no patterned lines & only hairlines) are arbitrary
>from a platform-neutral point of view.
>        Sorry if I sound a bit grumpy, but if dashes are going to be a
>half-baked implementation, why bother with them at all?
>        This illustrates one of my major concerns with _any_
>platform-independent standard, that it can become a hodge-podge of features
>culled from various sources, with no internal consistency or completeness.

My understanding/expectation is that ODF is supposed to smooth out the
differences between the API's of the two platforms, something that it seems
to do reasonably well.  I don't recall anyone from the ODF team ever saying
that the goal of ODF was to provide a cross-platform framework that fixed all
of the shortcomings of each platform and thereby presented the Ultimate
Platform-Neutral API.  Not supporting dashed lines at all would be succumbing
to the dreaded Least Common Denominator approach to cross-platform code.
Implementing a limited form of dashed line on the Mac and thereby bringing
the two platforms into parity (the Greatest Common Denominator approach)
seems like a reasonable solution to me.

Kirk Swenson
Senior Software Engineer
Key Curriculum Press
[e-mail]