Well, that is also the idea behind Microsoft's WPF/XAML: they provide a declarative approach to describe the widget tree (specifying what it is, not what is does), and a GUI toolkit (Expression Blend) for artists and designers so they can use a high level tool to build the GUI. You can even define limited behavior and animation in a declarative way. However, I believe those "designer friendly" tools are not designed by designers but by programmers who claim to think what designers want. I work everyday with artists and designers, and these people are frustrated by the limitations and erratic behavior (read "side effects") of most "designer friendly" tools... Furthermore making even a simple GUI requires a lot of collaboration between the developer and the designer, and this screams for a language that both can understand and reason about :-)
Also, this approach is nice for "simple" or (should I say mostly form-based GUIs), but as soon as you get into something more complicated, this design won't help you. For example, try to make a mathematical editor like that... or a diagram editor... IMO any GUI framework should work for complicated GUIs as well as easy form based one. I feel the model -> presentation -> view -> reactivity -> model' cycle is still the best approach today for building complex GUIs. Never start with widgets, these are just a possible representation of a model. Although this paradigm comes from Smalltalk, MVC is really functional in my opinion.. If you make that approach compositional *and* fast, you have a winner. Something like FRUIT on steroids (Grapefruit? ;-) but then of course you are stuck with the arrows syntax which feels like drawing graphical circuits with a text editor ;-) 2009/2/2 John A. De Goes <j...@n-brain.net> > > The size, color, and layout of widgets has no effect on interaction > semantics and is best pushed elsewhere, into a designer-friendly realm such > as CSS. > > Regards, > > John A. De Goes > N-BRAIN, Inc. > The Evolution of Collaboration > > http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101 > > On Feb 2, 2009, at 2:15 PM, Conal Elliott wrote: > > Could CSS give us semantic clarity? - Conal > > On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:58 AM, John A. De Goes <j...@n-brain.net> wrote: > >> >> The actual presentation and layout of widgets would be better handled by a >> DSL such as CSS (which is, in fact, declarative in nature), while event >> logic would be best handled purely in Haskell. >> >> Regards, >> >> John A. De Goes >> N-BRAIN, Inc. >> The Evolution of Collaboration >> >> http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101 >> >> >> On Feb 2, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Creighton Hogg wrote: >> >> 2009/1/29 Conal Elliott <co...@conal.net>: >>> >>>> Hi Achim, >>>> >>>> I came to the same conclusion: I want to sweep aside these OO, >>>> imperative >>>> toolkits, and replace them with something "genuinely functional", which >>>> for >>>> me means having a precise & simple compositional (denotational) >>>> semantics. >>>> Something meaningful, formally tractable, and powefully compositional >>>> from >>>> the ground up. As long as we build on complex legacy libraries (Gtk, >>>> wxWidgets, Qt, OpenGL/GLUT, ...), we'll be struggling against (or worse >>>> yet, >>>> drawn into) their ad hoc mental models and system designs. >>>> >>>> As Meister Eckhart said, "Only the hand that erases can write the true >>>> thing." >>>> >>> >>> I think working on a purely functional widget toolkit would actually >>> be a really cool project. Do you have any ideas, though, on what >>> should be the underlying primitives? >>> >>> The initial gut feeling I have is that one should just ignore any >>> notion of actually displaying widgets & instead focus on a clean >>> algebra of how to 'add' widgets that relates the concepts of >>> inheritance & relative position. What I mean by inheritance, here, is >>> how to direct a flow of 'events'. I don't necessarily mean events in >>> the Reactive sense, because I think it'd be important to make the >>> model completely independent of how time & actual UI actions are >>> handled. >>> >>> Any thoughts to throw in, here? >>> >>> Cheers, >>> C >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >>> Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org >>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >> Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org >> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > >
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