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On Monday, October 21, 2002, at 02:19 PM, m batsis wrote:
>
> This [1] has been my favorite applet for some time.
Ick.
>> I looked at UIML and it looks like a bad joke to me. I can't
>> remember when I've seen something less readable and more complicated
>> that did so little. So much noise for so little signal.
>
> So little? Reusing UI presentation and logic, including behaviour
> hooks for interaction logic to output to different UI formats such as
> Swing and HTML is lots more that "so little" and I have not seen any
> contender to UIML yet.
Maybe because nobody else thinks its a good idea? I don't see it. Nor
do I believe in the underlying goal - self adaptable UI's aren't
practical. They are always very clunky. You need to rethink task flow
completely when shifting devices with different constraints.
>> Your later comment about hammers is particularly applicable. ML's
>> are really poor mechanisms for describing behavior. They're sort of
>> poor mechanisms for describing relationships (they impose a sort of
>> directional view via the element nesting that is artificial - is
>> artist inside of CD or is CD inside of artist - depends).
>
> XML is a format with hierarchical relationship semantics build-in
> while non-hierarchical relationships can be described easily. And it's
> a text format, not a proprietery representation you cannot send over
> to your partner without tons of documentation and code for him to be
> able to use it.
>
Its heavily biased towards hierarchical. I don't think the second
statement is a sentence.
> Verbose and unreadable? It's by far the more efficient mechanism I
> have seen in action,
> it works without compiling enything and it's possibilities are
> unlimited.
OK, nothing fits this scenario. All possibilities are limited. As for
verbose and unreadable, I was referring to the UIML thing. It is, if
you'll excuse the expression, clearly a cluster fuck. Sadly, the thing
is in PDF so I can't copy the example to show you, but it takes
something like 10 lines to say
element setTarget: aTarget action: #performClick:
In fact it took me several minutes to penetrate the cruft to figure out
that this is all it did.
OTOH, there is perhaps a certain usefulness in the XBL thing. If I
read it correctly, its primary purpose is to pack together bits of
JavaScript into components. I like that. Using WebObjects, I could
build components that render that way (I like WebObjects design
paradigm - it builds a conventional GUI on the server that happens to
render by emitting HTML and it delivers page requests as UI events -
this is sensible but limiting in some ways as the browser's event
delivery rate is not too good).
> It also utilizes browser capabilities to the maximum.
Is it supported in Explorer? Because maybe I'd use it. But even this
tiny bit of improvement (for me - its just a tweak in the emitters in
the WebObjects UI elements) doesn't address the underlying issues of
binding UI to business models in a clean reusable way.
Todd Blanchard
System Architect
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