Hi Tim and the DSpace developers community!
Thank you for the important announcements and organizing the future
"special topics meetings"!
DSpace UI could be the subject of one of those meetings ?
For a long time, I have been worrying about what is the right process
for Java Web application development.
Pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fit better and I would like to
share my experience.
For me, KISS ("fit to the task" has said Robert Tansley in Göteborg) is
essential.
It is the reason, I immediately liked DSpace.
(and Agile Manifesto is my moto: http://agilemanifesto.org/ )
I did not followed the XML-UI track (adding an XSLT layer was
"intuitively" felt as too heavy for me).
But I am unhappy with the JSP-UI which would need a strong
cleaning/refactoring.
Which principles should guide such a cleaning? How could it fit with the
XML-UI development efforts ?
One book hopefully just stroked me on this topic:
"Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design" by Andy Clarke
http://transcendingcss.com/
The main idea demonstrated is the same than the intent of the XSLT layer:
Java code should provide a (user level) conceptual view of data that
XSLT should transform into presentation.
Just replace the word XSLT by CSS !!! Then:
* The user browser is working more to apply CSS on received XHTML data
* The DSpace server is working a lot less (no XSLT stylesheet to interpret)
* People with vision disabilities receives nicely semantically
structured data and are not bewildered with data structured for
presentation.
The corollary of this is that project development then follows these steps:
1) Interaction design: what is the succession of steps a user may be
requested to do for a given task?
2) Generation design: what is the data tagged with "user level" concepts
(using XHTML and microformats) that must be sent to the user browser?
Does the DSpace Java generation layer for XML-UI could be used as
a basis of such semantically tagged xHTML
(removing XSLT processing from the server) ?
3) Presentation design: how this data is presented on the Web page: CSS
only is enough!
CSS can even change the **ordering** of data blocks on the page.
The nice thing with that:
* all the presentation level is in one language mastered by Web
Designers: CSS
* all programming is in one language: Java (JSP eases the upper level of
generation)
Simplicity, performance, scalability...
* programmers don't wait for Web designers to implement interaction and
generation.
A common vocabulary (the semantical tagging of generated data) must be
developed with the users
(it conveys the users concepts behind the presentation).
Everybody is working at the same conceptual level and the same words:
users, web designers, programmers...
Compass (http://compass-style.org/) is a tool designed to manage the
link between the semantic CSS classes and the presentation parameters.
I think this could be very good news to all our USERS!
My experiments (not applying enough the above CSS strategy for now) are
shown below with the image of a mosaïc of HTML frames.
ASKOSI (my SKOS authority lists navigation tool) is joined with
WindMusic.org (DSpace application).
The applications are exploded in 3 frames to guarantee that the page you
click in is not hidden by the result of this click
(from a result set, you get record displays without erasing the result set;
from a record display, you can explore linked data without erasing the
record).
The idea is to create a "librarian/power user" workbench for DSpace and
other "data linked" applications.
If the image is too big so you can look at it here:
http://www.destin.be/im/AskosiExample.PNG
If you would like to understand the symbols:
http://www.destin.be/ASKOSI/Wiki.jsp?page=Icons%20for%20SKOS
Have a nice day!
Christophe Dupriez
Informaticien
DESTIN inc. SSEB
Belgium
[email protected]
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