At 08:54 PM 5/23/2001 +1000, Cees Hek wrote:
>On Tue, 22 May 2001, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
>
>
>This sounds very useful and powerful. I've been looking for a project to
>help out with, and this one sounds interesting to me. Let me know if you
>want some help developing it, or someone to bounce ideas off...
Yes!
> > <TR>
> > <TH>First Name:</TH><TD><widget id="fname"/></TD>
> > <TH>Last Name:</TH><TD><widget id="lname"/></TD>
> > <TH>Comments</TH><TD><widget id="comments"/></TD>
> > </TR>
>
>One thing that I think is very important is to let designers have control
>over the look and feel of the interface. Your widget library should have
>some mechanism to allow a template designer to specify attributes for a
>widget (like width, height, colour, etc...).
>
><widget id="comments" width="100" height="5" color="red">
>- or -
><widget id="comments" attr="width=100; height=5; color=red">
>
>You can still allow programmers to have control over how the data is
>verified, and other attributed like maxlength for text fields and
>such.
>
>Of course these attributes will not be useful in every type of widget.
>ie if the programmer decided that this widget is going to be a text field
>instead of a textarea, then the above height attribute would be useless,
>and ignored.
Hmmm. I had not thought of this because we do not provide this capability
now in the Java widget library that we have and we don't really miss it.
For color, most UI widgets do not have color. For font and height, I think
that most designers don't change this often and if they do, it can be
adjusted in the config file ... usually the widgets themselves don't change
-- it's the stuff around the forms that do 90% of the time.
However, it does bring up an interesting point. On the one hand, I want to
abstract away from the designer what the widget is. For example, it should
be up to the app developer whether I use a textfield or a text area. But
defining a "width" for a text area is very different from defining a width
for a text field.
I realize that in the ideal world we would separate these concerns out. But
having tried it the HTML::StickyWidgets way and the application widget way,
I know that I like the application widget way better. I think there is
room for your idea though but I haven't honestly thought about it.
