samreid
commented
2 years ago At today's dev meeting, the main question is whether we want UI components to be resizable or static by default.
@jonathanolson says: If buttons are resizable by default (which is a great long-term goal), then we would have to visit many sims and update them accordingly.
We discussed that it is OK to change the default now, and allow some breakage in existing sims. We will catch them as we go, or during QA. We would like sims to reflow and have dynamic layouts.
This wouldn't break maintenance releases because the changes won't appear in the maintenance branches.
@zepumph asks if we see a problem, do we have to invest in the long-term layout fix, or can it be band-aided with a widthSizable: false override?
@kathy-phet says we do not want to go through all 100 sims by hand and spend a long time making long term fixes.
@pixelzoom agrees the widthSizable: false override is great for now where necessary.
@zepumph asks if we can run a pixel comparison to visualize the main differences?
@jonathanolson reports: Code may get into infinite loops. @pixelzoom says that is OK since we need to find and address those problems.
The team was all thumbs up and confetti.
Leaving assigned to @jonathanolson to change the default to true wherever possible. It will be more than Button. I'll record shas before and after so we can do pixel comparisons post-hoc if desired. I'll look for overrides that can be eliminated. I'll fix obvious defects, crashes, CT problems, etc.
jonathanolson
pixelzoom
zepumph
@kathy-phet asked me to put this on the Developer Meeting agenda with high priority.
While adding support for dynamic layout to Natural Selection in https://github.com/phetsims/natural-selection/issues/319, I discovered that sun buttons were not resizing when their associated Text changed. @jonathanolson pointed me to the
widthSizabletrue option, and explained that it currently defaults tofalsebecause "It would break backwards compatibility to make all buttons resize for their content (some sims relied on the buttons not resizing)"And I'm guessing that sun buttons are not the only place where this will be an issue. There are probably other common-code UI components where this will need to be addressed.
Discussing with @kathy-phet, she felt (and I think I agree) that it would be better to make resizing the default behavior, and have to opt-out if you don't want it. Dynamic locale and dynamic text is the future for PhET, and having to opt-in is one more pain point. It's also probably OK to break some sims that depend on static button size, and fix them when they are to be republished.