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> peter says I find it interesting that "data driven" can someone how be viewed as in opposition from giving the user a better UI. In the end, the metadata that should be used to build user interfaces is still data and exposing
that as early and directly as possible and giving the users ways to manipulate that data is the best way to build a powerful user interface. Exposing it directly as XML is probably not part of that scenario, but XSLT on top of XML can be directly below the
layer that is exposed to the user and is very flexible and powerful. >
I come from a long history of being pulled into doing UI when I wasnt really good at it
(20+ years ... think X10, DOS ... and on through all incarnations of Windows, Mac, Devices , Palm, PPC, BlackBerry, iOS .... ) "Data Driven" GUI has always been a holy grail. In some closed systems it succeed quite well ... especially when the expectations of the users were modest and the computer capabilities were equally modest. But as time advances I find the concept on less solid grounds then my liking. I spent a day at Balisage Pre-conference hoping that what I didn't know about XForms would enlighten and endear me to the concept. I am afraid it did not. I simply have not seen how a data driven UI ( unless that data is presentation oriented + program code) can achieve what "ordinary users" expect out of a "normal UI". There are certainly a lot of cases where the UI can meet the minimum standards, and balanced against the problem of multi devices
and variety of input is a good tradeoff. But when you hit the bounds of "application" where users expect that it was actually written for them ... and where the function and display (the whole UX) is more than filling out form fields or showing some tables,
to me, I have not seen a "Data Driven UI" that meets that expectation - unless you constrain the space very tightly. That is you create a very good UI framework
then plug in the data driven stuff to fit it. But I have used many such things and while they work well within their box, if you push up against the edges they fail miserably. I would love to have someone show me the Holy Grail ... I still think it might be out there, but have not found it myself. ---------------------------------------- David A. Lee |