[Haskell-cafe] Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't make any sense

[John A. De Goes]

The size, color, and layout of widgets has no effect on interaction  
semantics and is best pushed elsewhere, into a designer-friendly realm  
such as CSS.

Regards,

John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration

http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101

On Feb 2, 2009, at 2:15 PM, Conal Elliott wrote:

> Could CSS give us semantic clarity?  - Conal
>
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:58 AM, John A. De Goes <john at n-brain.net>  
> wrote:
>
> The actual presentation and layout of widgets would be better  
> handled by a DSL such as CSS (which is, in fact, declarative in  
> nature), while event logic would be best handled purely in Haskell.
>
> Regards,
>
> John A. De Goes
> N-BRAIN, Inc.
> The Evolution of Collaboration
>
> http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Creighton Hogg wrote:
>
> 2009/1/29 Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net>:
> Hi Achim,
>
> I came to the same conclusion: I want to sweep aside these OO,  
> imperative
> toolkits, and replace them with something "genuinely functional",  
> which for
> me means having a precise & simple compositional (denotational)  
> semantics.
> Something meaningful, formally tractable, and powefully  
> compositional from
> the ground up.  As long as we build on complex legacy libraries (Gtk,
> wxWidgets, Qt, OpenGL/GLUT, ...), we'll be struggling against (or  
> worse yet,
> drawn into) their ad hoc mental models and system designs.
>
> As Meister Eckhart said, "Only the hand that erases can write the true
> thing."
>
> I think working on a purely functional widget toolkit would actually
> be a really cool project.  Do you have any ideas, though, on what
> should be the underlying primitives?
>
> The initial gut feeling I have is that one should just ignore any
> notion of actually displaying widgets & instead focus on a clean
> algebra of how to 'add'  widgets that relates the concepts of
> inheritance & relative position.  What I mean by inheritance, here, is
> how to direct a flow of 'events'.  I don't necessarily mean events in
> the Reactive sense, because I think it'd be important to make the
> model completely independent of how time & actual UI actions are
> handled.
>
> Any thoughts to throw in, here?
>
> Cheers,
> C
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20090202/cd4432fb/attachment.htm