Some time ago we had a similar challenge for a backoffice application targeting editors and developers. The following demo is fully functional in Firefox and Safari (shows cosmetic bugs in IE):
http://www.icograma.com/demos/rulebuilder/ The editor allows building nested conditions via GUI or XML. As expected, changes are reflected between modes. The XML is what the backoffice app actually gets and understands. Since we are allowing conditions to be added or removed, we can avoid the dreaded long form with blank fields. The "Simple default new rule" example shows the display of a simple default to get started. This follows the same "design pattern" (looks fun to use & abuse the term, I wanna play too) used in iTunes, several mail clients, etc. That is less confusing than showing a long form with several "logically disabled" conditions (as "greater than... zero", or "contains... [blank]"). Logically disabled conditions are a case of programmer's design rather than good design. To a programmer, it makes sense to think that there are zero pink elephants in the room. The rest of mankind does not clutter their minds thinking about pink elephants or, better said, their absence. -- Santiago Bustelo // icograma Buenos Aires, Argentina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=32254 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
