[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wars!
On Monday, October 21, 2002, at 02:19 PM, m batsis wrote: > > This [1] has been my favorite applet for some time. Ick. >> I looked at UIML and it looks like a bad joke to me. I can't >> remember when I've seen something less readable and more complicated >> that did so little. So much noise for so little signal. > > So little? Reusing UI presentation and logic, including behaviour > hooks for interaction logic to output to different UI formats such as > Swing and HTML is lots more that "so little" and I have not seen any > contender to UIML yet. Maybe because nobody else thinks its a good idea? I don't see it. Nor do I believe in the underlying goal - self adaptable UI's aren't practical. They are always very clunky. You need to rethink task flow completely when shifting devices with different constraints. >> Your later comment about hammers is particularly applicable. ML's >> are really poor mechanisms for describing behavior. They're sort of >> poor mechanisms for describing relationships (they impose a sort of >> directional view via the element nesting that is artificial - is >> artist inside of CD or is CD inside of artist - depends). > > XML is a format with hierarchical relationship semantics build-in > while non-hierarchical relationships can be described easily. And it's > a text format, not a proprietery representation you cannot send over > to your partner without tons of documentation and code for him to be > able to use it. > Its heavily biased towards hierarchical. I don't think the second statement is a sentence. > Verbose and unreadable? It's by far the more efficient mechanism I > have seen in action, > it works without compiling enything and it's possibilities are > unlimited. OK, nothing fits this scenario. All possibilities are limited. As for verbose and unreadable, I was referring to the UIML thing. It is, if you'll excuse the expression, clearly a cluster [expletive deleted]. Sadly, the thing is in PDF so I can't copy the example to show you, but it takes something like 10 lines to say element setTarget: aTarget action: #performClick: In fact it took me several minutes to penetrate the cruft to figure out that this is all it did. OTOH, there is perhaps a certain usefulness in the XBL thing. If I read it correctly, its primary purpose is to pack together bits of JavaScript into components. I like that. Using WebObjects, I could build components that render that way (I like WebObjects design paradigm - it builds a conventional GUI on the server that happens to render by emitting HTML and it delivers page requests as UI events - this is sensible but limiting in some ways as the browser's event delivery rate is not too good). > It also utilizes browser capabilities to the maximum. Is it supported in Explorer? Because maybe I'd use it. But even this tiny bit of improvement (for me - its just a tweak in the emitters in the WebObjects UI elements) doesn't address the underlying issues of binding UI to business models in a clean reusable way. Todd Blanchard System Architect
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