Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs / dmu.ac.uk> wrote:
>I feel I must ask this, although it may be daft:
>
>We seem to be discussing which GUI to tie ruby into, to ensure
>the widest support.  But we don't know how things are going to 
>change in the future, and such change may not be far away, in 
>this field.  Should we not be providing an abstraction to which
>any GUI can be attached?  I see such an abstraction as a superset
>of facilities, in which some facilities for the less capable GUIs
>will be emulated by groups of components, rather than single
>components.

In one sense, that's what each of these cross-
platform GUI toolkits are. They try to hide 
Win32, GTK, XLIB, or whatever from you. I guess 
you're proposing moving up one additional layer, 
and wrapping the wrappers. I suspect you'd have 
several problems with that approach:
1. Different paradigms
2. Performance
3. Keeping up with multiple underlying "engines"

But it would be cool. Perhaps a very, very simple 
toolkit could pull it off. Something with almost 
no options or flexibility.

Kevin