Re: Keyed Archiving and MOSX compatibility...

[Gregory John Casamento]

--- Nicola Pero <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > > 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. :-)

This is an extremely interesting point, indeed. :)

GJC


=====
Gregory John Casamento -- CEO/President Open Logic Corp.

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