[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Does WTSIWYG make simplicity moot? (was Re: dtds,
** Reply to message from Paul Prescod <paul@p...> on Tue, 12 Nov 2002 22:38:48 -0800 > A multimedia developer is usually a visual person. They are working on > creating a visual product. It isn't surprising to me that a visual > environment would be more efficient than a textual one. But I'm talking > about something like a computer program or a schema which has no > intrinsic preference one way or the other. I think you are playing the man there instead of the ball. One shouldn't dismiss a successful GUI just because it targets visual work products. > * Second, you're contrasting the visual abstraction layer with Lingo, > which is a full programming language and probably at totally the wrong > layer of abstraction. I have faith that whatever Lingo's GUI got right > as an abstraction could be emulated in a carefully designed XML > vocabulary (perhaps something like SMIL???) It isn't fair to compare a > carefully designed GUI abstraction to a poorly chosen textual abstraction. I'm not comparing them. I'm pointing out that they happily co-exist, and you can use whichever is most comfortable, whichever suits your abilities best. The point which I had wanted you to take away was that this harmony comes about because the visual paradigm came about first, the language came afterwards and had to work seemlessly with the visual interface. The problem with many specs, in a sense, is that they only requirement is to produce something that can be dealt with, however tediously, using a plain text editor. It would be very different if a visual metaphor was an integral part of the spec. It would no longer be such an issue to build IDEs that are able to present all of the functionality in a usable manner. And while I'm sure some spec participants would reel in horror at the thought of having to deal with a visual dimension as well, there are precedents. UML is a particularly good one. Cheers, Tony. ==== Anthony B. Coates, Information & Software Architect mailto:abcoates@T... MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language) http://www.mddl.org/
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