[jmarshall]

Obviously portrait versus landscape can't be done automatically across the board in any sane way, however MANY things can be shared. Simple example is dialogs on a tablet. Almost all of them can quite happily render only in the middle "square" of the screen which is shared between portrait and landscape, so no need to provide a skin that independently specifies both XML files - rather, you'd just supply a common set of XML files and XBMC should automatically place them centred as you want.

The main point I'm getting at is that for aspect ratios that don't differ significantly, eg 16:9 versus 16:10 versus 4:3, a common skin that allows some things to scale and some to simply shift can improve the display of every skin across multiple devices without forcing the skin to have a bunch of repetitive code where only a couple of positions change and everything else stays the same.

So, ignore portrait versus landscape. Consider 16:9 versus 4:3 only. How can we make it so that current skins look as nice as possible without the pure stretching that goes on now - i.e. how can we best specify "scale this control" versus "leave this unscaled where possible and alter the positioning instead"?

Cheers,
Jonathan