Hey,
I am glad you wrote, as I recently got very excited about this type of
stuff. ...
It's been rumoured that Mike Skowronski said:
>
> What I was trying to do was not reinvent tcl/tk I was looking to get away
> from web browsers in general. If you had two networked xml interpreters at
> two nodes in a network you could in effect make application that look just
> like normal GUIs but the end user has no idea that its really XML under
> the surface.
Using XML in a declarative fashion for this seems to be a recurring idea.
FYI, OFX is an xml-based financial protocol for on-line banking. But
one thing I object to are attempts to use XML as a vehicle for proceedural
network protocols (which ofx strays on the boundry of). IIOP seems
to be a much more mature, better developed, better thought out protocol,
with a hell of a lot more tools behind it (i.e. corba). Whenever i hear
xml...network... I think "mistake, use corba/iiop".
> In effect the window manager is the xml processor. You could embedd
> applications much like hunky-clunky OLE just by supplying a user defined
> tag. <myapp> and it would embedd this within the scope of a document.
Hmm, you must know this, but I think you are being upstaged by netscape
(unless you are participating ..) Thier XPFE pages on mozilla.org
talk about having an xml markup define the layout of buttons, menus, you
name-its gui elements, pretty much along the lines of your code, based
on my shallow browsing of the sites. Part of what makes thier efforts
exciting is that they have a powerful layout engine (raptor) to actually
get things positioned properly. Sounds to me like your saying that
I should just make raptor/xpfe control my root window ... hmm ...
> This is where I want to take this. I want to make a simple elegant
> component technology that is a no brainer to use.
Bing! Yes yes! simple ... no brainer ... that's what made the web really
take off. Now if we could replicate that for gui design... wow! It make
things like themes.org look like a pale side-show, while a zillion
non-programmers, high-school kids, grandma's etc. rushed out to create
killer gui's for killer apps.
> You can derive off of a
> class called plugin and in essance any application you want now gets
> embedded into the document.
I'm concerned about the richness of the widget set. GnuCash has a
special, rather sophisticated table widget which is used to provide
the checkbook-like register intrface. A stumbling block has been the
lack of anything similar in either gtk or Qt.
Anyway, I want to embed this register in an html/xml layout. With XmHTML,
I think I know how, but haven't taken the plunge ... it doesn't entirely
make sense until the rest of the baggage like xml-builder, or xpfe is
there.
> The second point is the current trend with people thrying to embedd
> scripts within a markup language. I beleave that this is a bad idea.
I agree, I sank down to embedded perl because I needed something, now.
The only thing worse than scripts embedded in html is html embedded in
C/C++ code ...
> The markup should be dumb and declaritive only. By being able to declare
> your own tags on the fly you can place intelligence where it belongs in a
> real language like C/C++, Perl and Python. This way you have debugging
> tools . This is the downfall of JavaScript is that its very hard to step
> through the code and debug it. Only microsoft to my knowledge has a
> JavaScript debugger but still its a hack. The purpose of JavaScript to
> begin with was to work around the deficincies of HTML.
OK, explain to me how to do this in your view of the world: I have C code,
it is going to generate a table with N rows; I only know N at run time.
How do I create html/xml that will display properly?
The (ugly but still the best I could think of) solution I picked was to
have the c code dump the N rows into a perl array, and then use perl
to loop & generate the table. This seemed to give me the best of both
worlds: no html embedded in my c code, and no invent-your-own declarative
language (I'd invented a declarative language for html embedding once
before, see www.teleportal.com for a working example).
Show me a better way ...
--linas
> David Schere
>
>
> On Wed, 14 Oct 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > It's been rumoured that Arnt Gulbrandsen said:
> > >
> > > Someone's just written something like that for Qt. You write xml with
> > > tags like "button", <tabdialog>" etc.
> > >
> > > http://www.didx.com/xml-builder.html looks like it.
> >
> > Hmm,
> >
> > That's interesting, & I have to digest that some more.
> > But it strikes me as a kind of re-inventing tcl/tk but with XML.
> >
> > I want to do something different:
> > I want to create a file, e.g. report.phtml, have it look something like
> > this:
> >
> > <body>
> > <H1>This Is The Big Financial Report</H1>
> > Check out this table:
> > <table>
> > <? $i=0; while ($acct[i]) {
> > print "<tr><td>$accname[i] <td>$acctype[i] <td>$accbalance[i] \n";
> > i++ }
> > >
> > </table>
> > </body>
> >
> > I have C code that sets up the arrays $accname[i], etc. It then calls
> > the client-side PHP interepreter to run the above, and create the true
> > html; finally, the XmHTML widget displays it.
> >
> > Something like this is done quite often inside of cgi-bins and server
> > modules; I want to do it in a client, not a server.
> >
> > --linas
> >
>
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