> Your work here is wonderful. (I hope my students don't find what you've done > and then try to turn it in for their final projects.)
thanks. They could also improve my widgets, if they want. There is lots of room to improve them. > a) your notion that "widgets" should be more than just radio buttons, > selects and the like, but should also include, maybe, > sliders, color pickers, or even sorters, classifiers, mappers, chat rooms, > etc., is very appealing. Some standards for the desired functionalities of > these "higher order widgets" might be a good idea. Is anyone working on such > standards? That might be fun. yes, I think that higher order widgets should be made available, but its not always obvious where to draw the border between a widget and an application. Generally, a widget should be re-usable for many applications and should not be overly complex. A problem with higher order widgets is, that its virtually impossible to cover all different ideas regarding design, look and feel and behavior of these widgets. As an example I can take the slider. With a few attributes I can adjust the look and feel of the sliderline and one can create a symbol on its own. This already offers a lot of possibilities. But then, take a higher order widget, such as a colourpicker. One wants an RGB one, one wants a HSV one, one doesn't like the thickness of the slider lines, or doesn't like the placement of the text labels, etc. If I want to expose all attributes of a higher order widget, it would need 100 and more parameters, which makes it unusable to use. So, perhaps with the higher order widgets, a user really has to change the code of the widget, while with the simpler widgets, it might be enough to change the attributes exposed by the widget. As far as other W3C initiatives regarding widgets: yes, there is XForms, but this mainly deals with logic and behavior aspects of the widgets and doesn't cover presentation, which is the domain of other languages, such as HTML or SVG. And there is HTML forms of course. Besides that, there are many Ajax (e.g. Dojo) and Flash toolkits offering widgets. But those are as proprietary as my own widgets. Ideally one could combine the XForms model with a SVG presentation layer. Its already done for HTML or other techniques, so why not with SVG? But I haven't dived into XForms to know more about it. I also think that for many cases it is better to use SVG widgets than to start mixing SVG and HTML, only for the purpose of having easy access to widgets. HTML widgets are not that easy customizable and often aren't scalable/transformable, as the SVG widgets. Thats why I created these SVG widgets. > b) take a look at this color picker > http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/rainbow.svg -- it is an HSV (or > HSB color picker) that allows two different sliders for the value of Hue, > one at a more zoomed level. The data I have on human factors for such > widgets is entirely inconclusive, though I believe it to be demonstrable > that humans do quite better in HSB space than they do in RGB space. yes, I also think that picking colours with an HSV/HSB colour picker is easier than with an RGB one. > c) depending on how we take the task of a slider: are we merely choosing an > approximate value within an interval, or are we chosing a specific value > within an interval, I think the canonical interface differs considerably. > How best might we enable a human to choose the number 731,654 (no higher or > lower)? Is there a slider which allows people to converge on that exact > number more quickly than typing it from a keyboard? How much might we > leverage from a single click and drag? A slider is probably not a good widget if you aim for precision of the input values. But often, that is not really needed. If I want to adopt the zoom level of a map or the opacity of a map layer, I don't care if the value is exact or not. If you really want exact values, a textbox is better, or a combination between slider, textbox and arrow buttons. Andreas ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
