Re: Keyed Archiving and MOSX compatibility...

[Nicola Pero]

> > The programmer can decide which information is essential and which is
> > not, which is something a machine can't do.
> > 
> > If you want to keep a fixed background color on all platforms, maybe 
> > because yours is a yellow post-it application and you want all
> > windows to have a yellow background, you can do it.
> > 
> > If you just want to create a window with a standard background, you
> > don't put the background color in the file.
> > 
> ...
> > 
> > Do you store the background color of windows ?  If yes, you are
> > storing a platform-specific detail in the file.  If not, you are not
> > giving to the programmer the possibility of forcing a special
> > background color for his/her windows.
> 
> I just did snip out these two sections of your posting as they point to 
> an interesting point in the Apple keyed encoding NIB files. The standard 
> answer to your question would of course be to store the named colour 
> system/windowbackground to handle this special case. But interestingly 
> this is not what Apple does most of the times. They seem to have a 
> clever algorithm to decide what to put into the NIB file and what to 
> leave out. Fields that have their standard values are normally not 
> encoded at all, so on a different target machine the default values 
> there will be used. This concept works for a lot more things than just 
> colours and fonts, which we could easyly handle specifically. If you 
> look through an XML NIB file you will see that only a minimal set of 
> attributes for each object are stored.

Thanks.  Interesting.  I'll indeed have a deeper look. :-)