KDE & Standards

This section contains information about the industry and de facto standards KDE uses. The industry standards are ones that are used or implemented by KDE (for instance, we use the XML standard to write XML documents, and we implement the Window Manager Hint standard with KWin). KDE standards are the guidelines used internally, related to UI design and consistency. The Policies section also contains standards-like documents that relate to developer activity.

KDE Standards

• HCI docs

  A list of very good Human Computer Interface documentation. If you do anything with the design of a GUI you should read this.

• KDE User Interface Guidelines

  The KDE User Interface Guidelines.

• KDE KControl Module Guidelines

  Styleguide standards for KConfig Modules used in combination with KControl.

External Standards

• XML

  The Extensible Markup language. KOffice's document formats are applications of this. It is also used as configuration file format by an increasing number of KDE programs.

• DOM

  The Document Object Model as defined by the W3C. Qt's QDom*classes are modeled after this.

• XDND

  The specification for the inter-application drag and drop protocol used by Qt and Gtk. Meanwhile, several other applications use it.

• Extended Window Manager Hint Standard

  Also called NETWM or EWMH, the protocol for window manager interaction, supported by many window manager authors.

• Desktop Entry Standard

  The format of .desktop files, supported by KDE and GNOME.

• MIME types

  Files types (as used to show appropriate icons in the file manager and to categorize data in drag & drop and clipboard operations) follow the convention known as MIME. Here you can find a list of registered content types.

• URL

  Uniform resource locators, defined by RFC 1738.

• SM

  The X11R6.4 session management protocol. This is the backend protocol for KMainWindow's high-level session management features.

• iCalendar

  RFC 2445 - Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar). This is used to store KOrganizer and KArm data.

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