Development/Guidelines

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 section about policies also contains standards-like documents that relate to developer activity.

KDE Standards

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Documents

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

Community Identity Guidelines (CIG)

Definitions and recommendations which help the KDE Project to establish a unique, characteristic, and appealing design.

KDE User Interface Guidelines

The KDE User Interface Guidelines.

The new KDE User Interface Guidelines

The new KDE User Interface Guidelines, being developed by the KDE usability team for KDE 4. It is advisable to use them as much as possible for development for KDE 4, and use the old ones as fallback (or ask on the usability mailinglist: [email protected]).

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.

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 KTimeTracker (KArm in KDE < 4) data.