Home Page - 2002-09-22

XML GUI - Rectangles All The Way [Read this article]

...XML based GUI definitions are such platform independent models. As you know, XML parsing is fairly common and standardized in all platforms. XML is becoming a fairly simple, but importantly, the most accepted universal data format. If you consider a GUI design and its behavioral hooks itself as data, XML is the obvious choice to represent it. XUL is one such XML GUI format. As the Luxor lead developer declares, a change in XML format for GUI is relatively easy to cope, as XSL transformation is equally standardized and popular.

...Like many of the article in this site, this article too is not trying to put forth a complete theory. The idea is to present the importance of XML based GUIs, and to stress the centralness of the Layout models in that XML definition. We see that, as it is, we need a mixture of two or more layouts to define any rectangular composition. Of course, what that set of layout is? And how we prove that they can fully define any rectangular composition? Is still unsolved for me.

...The schema we use must be nimble enough to be transformed into another, with XSLT alone. If so, we must not include scripting or templating too much in our GUI definition, as XSLT is not strong there. Maybe a XML should only be a pure data model, and not a mix of scripting and data, as Luxor tries to be. Also instead of pushing data to the code that uses the GUI, they must pull it from the GUI. Only triggering of events could be a reasonable hook to the processing code.