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

[Thomas Davie]

On 3 Feb 2009, at 08:12, Achim Schneider wrote:

> "John A. De Goes" <john at n-brain.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Perhaps I should have been more precise:
>>
>> How do you define "layout" and "interaction semantics" in such a way
>> that the former has a *necessarily* direct, enormous impact on the
>> latter?
>>
>> HTML/CSS is a perfect example of how one can decouple a model of
>> content from the presentation of that content. The developer writes
>> the content model and the controller, while UX guys or designers get
>> to decide how it looks.
>>
> HTML, or rather XML, would be layout to me. GUI's usually don't serve
> static content, and allowing a CSS layer to position eg. a filter GUI
> that supports chaining up any amount of filters by slicing them apart
> and positioning them on top of each other (maybe because someone  
> didn't
> notice that you can use more than one filter) wrecks havoc on both
> usability and the semantics.
>
> "Wrecks havoc on the semantics" in the sense of that if a thing is
> editable, the semantics should guarantee that it is, indeed, editable.
> Likewise, if something is marked as visible (and such things are
> explicit in the model, not defined by an outer layer), the semantics
> should guarantee that it is visible.


I mostly don't get how a topic discussing how to do GUIs in a  
beautiful, consistent, composable, orthogonal, functional way got onto  
the topic of "oh hay, you could do it with html and css".  Sure, those  
two may be declarative languages, but that doesn't make either of them  
fill the list of features required above!


Bob