Rename the split pane machinery to Overview / Detail

[rjrjr]

Master / Detail is not great terminology.

[bencochran]

Agreed.

We’ve used “leading” and “trailing” for this in our Swift sample version. That has a bit of layout-y-ness to it though.

[rjrjr]

Main / Detail? Works a bit better with Kotlin's MasterDetailScreen, where the master slot is the non-optional one:

class MasterDetailScreen private constructor(
  val masterRendering: BackStackScreen<Any>,
  val detailRendering: BackStackScreen<Any>? = null,
  val selectDefault: (() -> Unit)? = null
) {

Still not great. :/

[rjrjr]

Parent / Child?

[rjrjr]

Found this in Learning Programming Using Visual Basic .NET:

As an alternative to the terms master and detail, we sometimes use the terms parent and child.

[zach-klippenstein]

Parent/child are so overloaded, that seems like it could be more confusing than anything. Especially in a sentence like "The ParentChildContainer has two child screens – one is the parent screen, and the other is the child screen."

[rjrjr]

Yeah, nonstarter.

Well so far I think I like Main better than Index

[zach-klippenstein]

The main screen is almost always a navigation screen, but there are probably too many exceptions to name it something navigation-related.

[zach-klippenstein]

Some ideas in this thread: https://twitter.com/zachklipp/status/1268646364625293312?s=20

[rjrjr]

From the Twitter thread, I like Overview / Detail a lot.

[zach-klippenstein]

I think the Detail terminology is pretty settled. So let's vote on the other one:

• 👍 Main
• 👎 Overview
• 😄 List
• 🎉 Summary
• 😕 Topic
• ❤️ Root
• 🚀 Primary (with Secondary for detail)
• 👀 Index

Please react on this message with your vote!

[zach-klippenstein]

One of the arguments for Primary/Secondary is that it opens the possibility for other screens, like Tertiary, etc. I personally am not a huge fan, since it's using very generic words to refer to a very specific layout pattern.

[rjrjr]

I strongly dislike Primary / Secondary. It implies a genericness that is misleading — there's a reason we didn't call this SplitPaneContainer. And WRT to a theoretical Tertiary in our future, YAGNI applies to naming as much as anything else.

[bencochran]

I like Overview/Detail over Main/Detail since one many contexts the detail screen is the “main” thing I’m interacting with.

[zach-klippenstein]

We've discussed offline, and reached a majority agreement on the terms Overview/Detail.