Re: Eclipse 3.3.1 .... and stuff

From: Thomas (webobject..oomeranet.com.au)
Date: Fri Oct 05 2007 - 23:56:51 EDT

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    It's amazing what you can do with CSS. I just opened the .html page
    from one of my components in Xyle Scope. My component uses only
    inline bindings. Below are three different views from Xyle Scope,
    after choosing three different style sheets in the preferences. And
    in any of these views, clicking on a block highlights that block in
    the three other inspection panels.

    I know it's a very long way to go from a WebKit display to editing,
    but what about the idea that when you click on a block (double
    click?), it takes you to the component source editor with that block
    selected?








    On 05/10/2007, at 11:16 AM, Kieran Kelleher wrote:

    > 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?
    >
    >
    >
    > <pastedGraphic.tiff>
    > <pastedGraphic.jpg>
    >
    > 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.
    >>>
    >>
    >



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