Interesting ..... hey, while we are in brainstorming mode (who knows,
we may just throw out a simple effective, easy-to-implement,
attractive-to-Mike idea)
Go to a site like http://www.mdimension.com and select View -> View
Source Chart in FireFox ....... this shows a very easy to read page
structure ...... and the styled borders really make it easy to see
what is in what ....... could the Preview be more easily made to look
like this "Source Chart" rendering that FireFox does, and even be
extendable with a CSS style sheet as Thomas suggested?
On Oct 4, 2007, at 7:10 PM, Thomas wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Thu Oct 04 2007 - 21:17:37 EDT
