Good thinking, of course.
You will find that a middle ground is nice - some relationship between
content and representation is useful, even an indication of type of
Object and state makes the application appear responsive/integrated. For
Style objects I would limit myself to a representation for each of the
"nounds" (ie Rule, PointSymbolizer, LineSymbolizer etc...) and for
bonus points try and reflect anything about their current status (the
current color should be fine). For crazy things like graphics marks
defined by SVG files you do not have to go all the way for WYSIWYG -
simply an indication of "custom" would suffice.
By all means treat preview as a separate problem, the goal is to use
consistent imagery first, making them even a little dynamic would be
great (there is a utility class in uDig that you can use).
Cheers,
Jody
Jody wrote:
Please note that with respect to SLD a lot of the fun comes from
dynamically generating the icons based on Symbolizer represented etc...
Like uDig does?
Hmm... I've thought about this quite some time and, yes, having this kind of
preview is nice, BUT: For complex, dynamic styles which style each object
differently, it is impossible to create just one representative icon or
preview. And icons in the size like uDig uses them in the layer view - they are
not very helpful for cases such as fe. where symbols are used to style points
and the icons are two or three times larger than the symbol or preview area...
I am sure you have made these experiences already in uDig.
I got something in my head, though ... what about style previews in the way
tooltips work? Extra floating window. This could then be as large as they need
to be to show the characteristics of a complex style. But this goes to the
creation of actual legends and is not my first priority now.
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