As a user, and someone who has only contributed opinions to this
awesome body of work, I'd like to offer yet another opinion.
I am a visual person, apparently like 50% of the general population
(and somewhat less than that for programmers). That means that I
really need something that tells the right-hemisphere "spatial
mapping and image recognition" area of my brain how it all fits
together. I need to see that this box fits inside that one, and this
box comes after that one, and this box looks like a conditional, and
that box looks like a string, and so on.
The outline view does not give me any of those visual cues, and is
restricted to a vertical indented list. I can't see that adding a few
features to it will help much-- although see the next paragraph for
one change that would help.
The Xyle scope approach gives the best of all worlds: a preview on
the left, a finder/wobuilder cascading column view in the top right,
and a very sophisticated outline view in the middle right. This
outline view has three significant advantages over the WOLips
component editor outline:
- its decoration and style make it much more recognisable and readable;
- it shows important attributes (and even some content) of the
elements it is displaying
- clicking on an element highlights it in the preview and column
view panels, and vice-versa.
If Mike could do that with Component Editor, I would be very happy,
and so would those of my customers who develop Webobjects, rather
than just use it. Most of them are technical managers, rather than
programmers, and they all love WO Builder.
I am sure it is hard to do this with static analysis. But I get the
feeling that with some CSS work, the new preview output could be
decorated to make it visually as useful as WO Builder.
Mike, I don't know how you are generating the HTML for WebKit to
display, but I imagine you are generating DIVs with appropriate
classes. If you added the type of component as a class, eg <div
class="woif">[if myCondition].....[/if myCondition]</div>, then each
component type could have its own decoration, and some could show
graphics. If you could send me an example of the HTML you are sending
to WebKit, I could have a tinker and see if I could demonstrate what
I mean. The beauty of this approach would be that developers could
add their own style sheets for their own reusable components.
Regards
Thomas
On 05/10/2007, at 7:47 AM, Kieran Kelleher wrote:
> I dunno, but it might be less work to build a few features into the
> Outline view to make it even more useful as a component navigation
> tool. It gives a nice "outline" of the component structure which is
> really all one needs for the very reasons Mike stated about CSS
> layout.
>
> Perhaps the Outline can be enhanced with less effort to give even
> more visualization of the component structure.
>
> On Oct 4, 2007, at 2:48 PM, Jerry W. Walker wrote:
>
>> Hi, Mike,
>>
>> Yes, I'm very familiar with the problem of visualization via
>> static analysis. I also went a few days down the path of designing
>> a replacement for WOBuilder early last year. I retained my notes
>> until I found Xyle Scope early this year. After I made the pitch
>> to them about taking on such a project, I tossed my notes. At
>> least I convinced them to put some diagrams in their documentation.
>>
>> It's too big a job for me without something coming back to put
>> dinner on the table (and keep my kids in college!).
>>
>> My thoughts keep lightly returning to Interface Builder and its
>> approach to page layout by archiving the objects. You referenced a
>> similar approach in your earlier email.
>>
>> In any case, I just thought I'd throw Xyle Scope in as a source of
>> ideas if you hadn't heard about it. I'm particularly fond of their
>> HTML view pane which can be reformatted by substituting another
>> style sheet for it.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jerry
>>
>>
>> On Oct 4, 2007, at 9:40 AM, Mike Schrag wrote:
>>
>>> Hey Jerry ... Yeah, I actually use Xyle as well, and it's a cool
>>> app. The major difference is that we often don't end up with an
>>> actual valid page (in HTML terms) via static analysis alone. To
>>> clarify, when I say "static analysis," I mean that we don't have
>>> a runtime, so we have to try to construct a page purely from
>>> looking at your bindings and structure outside of the context of
>>> real data. Straight visualization of an HTML + CSS editor is
>>> relatively "easy" (which is not to say it's ACTUALLY easy, just
>>> easy because there are several existing apps that do it), but
>>> when you throw in conditionals and repetitions, things get nasty
>>> really fast. A good example is that <tr> example I mentioned
>>> earlier ... I'm definitely trying to steal concepts from whomever
>>> I can, though :)
>>>
>>> ms
>>>
>>> On Oct 4, 2007, at 9:25 AM, Jerry W. Walker wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi, Mike,
>>>>
>>>> On Oct 4, 2007, at 8:19 AM, Mike Schrag wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> - some sort of box around the block elements, and the ability
>>>>>> to click on them to select them (yes, just like WO builder) so
>>>>>> you can scroll to the end of that one and see what's next
>>>>> I've tried out a bunch of various visualizations ...
>>>>
>>>> Have you ever used Xyle Scope? I've found it incredibly helpful
>>>> in parsing HTML/CSS pages for modification and refinement.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.culturedcode.com/xyle/
>>>>
>>>> I guess the best way to describe it is as a CSS viewer. Here's a
>>>> graphic from their web site that shows what it does:
>>>>
>>>> <Screenshot_en.jpg>
>>>>
>>>> You might take a look at the demo for ideas, if you're
>>>> interested, to see various ways that they show the source, the
>>>> cascade and the layout.
>>>>
>>>> I emailed their CEO a while back to see if they might be
>>>> interested in modifying/customizing their product into a
>>>> WOBuilder like tool, but it was hard to make any business case
>>>> for their doing so and they had new projects already planned.
>>>>
>>>> Sorry I haven't taken the opportunity more often to say what an
>>>> awesome job I think you and the rest of the Wonder team are
>>>> doing for the community but I've been under some intense
>>>> production pressures recently.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> __ Jerry W. Walker,
>> WebObjects Developer/Instructor for High Performance Industrial
>> Strength Internet Enabled Systems
>>
>> jerrywwalke..mail.com
>> 203 278-4085 office
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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