[Haskell-cafe] Elegant & powerful replacement for CSS

[Jeff Heard]

Bret's argument, though, only applies to Information Software.
Which...  hey, if you want to go with describing fundamentally
different approaches to GUIs based on the classifications he uses in
his arguments, I think that's a better place to start than trying to
figure out how to make a new denotationally-semantic GUI toolkit that
works for everyone everywhere.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Malcolm Wallace
<malcolm.wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
> Jeff Heard wrote:
>
>> Similarly, I've been wondering what's at the core of a GUI?  It seems
>> in recent years that more people have been moving towards web-based
>> applications, and away from traditional GUIs, so the meaning of them
>> may be changing.  The old question seemed to be Page vs.
>> Control-Board, but that seems like implementation, when the real
>> essence of a GUI is taking in common kinds of user input and
>> displaying output in a sensible way.
>
> I would go with Bret Victor's argument (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/)
> that the concept of user interface as primarily _interaction_ is misguided.
>  What GUIs are really about is visual _presentation_ of information.  The
> semantic questions are about what it means graphically to compose
> information sources.  We spend more time reading, viewing, and absorbing
> that information, than rearranging it, or adding to it.
>
> Interaction changes the sources, or the way they compose, but is (or should
> be) fundamentally an infrequent activity.  The better the visual
> presentation, the less you need to interact with it.
>
> Regards,
>    Malcolm
>
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