Ah, of course! I hadn't thought of that.
>
> > or "I have a yes/no/cancel question",
>
> Please if at all possible - avoid that. This is really bad for
> scripting ...
Yes, though that's why I suggested callbacks. A non-interactive
frontend like scanimage can supply callbacks that just deny the
request to ask a question, and the backend must be written to take
some suitable action even if all requests are denied.
I don't have any specific examples in mind (other than posting status
messages). Text fields are probably fine almost all the time, though
if there is some urgent information that needs to be conveyed to the
user, there isn't much urgency in a text field. For example, I imagine
some scanners might be capable of returning specific diagnostic
information that might be good to draw the user's attention to. If the
scanner fails in some way, it would be nice if interactive backends
like xscanimage could pop up a dialog box (indicating that the
information is important or somehow unusual) and say "Your scanner
seems to be broken. The diagnostic self-test indicates a problem with
[blah]." This way the interactive backends can act more as though they
were specifically tailored to each device. With just a generic text
field, there is no way for the frontend to distinguish between a
routine message and an urgent one, so the user interface cannot
reflect the difference.
Just my two cents. I don't think this is an urgently-needed feature,
just one that might be nice under some limited circumstances. I
realize that it's important to keep the API simple.
Kevin
-- Kevin Charter /\ Grad Studies charter@cs.ualberta.ca /\/ \ Department of Computing Science http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~charter \ -------- University of Alberta -------------- Edmonton AB CANADA
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