Re: [dev] [surf] xprop (was: few bugs)

On 29-10-2009 19:59:17, markus schnalke wrote:
> The quoted mail makes me share my thoughts on surf's xprop interface:
>
>
> At first, it seems pretty nice how surf communicates with the outside.
> But on closer looks, I dislike the xprop stuff more and more.
>
> What is shown above does surely not look nice; it's pretty obscure when
> you compare it to most of the suckless software we know.
>
> You may say that this does not matter much, as you only once need to
> find out how it has to be done.
>
>
> But -- and this my main point -- the xprop interface is a break on
> unleashing the leverage of surf!
>
> Uzbl may not be as small as surf, it's ``command language'' on the
> interface may be a bit too big, but it does one thing right where surf
> fails: It *encourages* to combine it with other programs!
>
>
> Surf is able to interface all kinds of programs through xprop, but not
> in an easy/flexible enough way. The large number of user scripts that
> extend uzbl is not the result of the larger community, but the result of
> the interface that makes you want to write ``handler'' scripts.
>
> Instead of staying hooked to xprop, surf should create a fifo for input
> and write stuff to stdout in order to make it easier/more flexible to
> combine it with helper scripts. This would improve surf much.
>
> Here (possibly) more code leads to less complexity combined with more
> flexibility.
>
>
> It's not enough to just offer possibilities; important is to encourage
> to use them ... by design. In this point surf fails, whereas uzbl does
> it right.
>
>
> meillo

Agreed. As now the looks like the only place in which surf uses xprop is
actually this uri and find handling. It's not really useful for setting
the address remotely, as we have better or worse patches for bookmarks,
we can open new surf instances in tabbed, etc.
Regards,
Ted

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