Musings on an Erlang GUI System.

[Vlad Dumitrescu (EAW)]

Hi Joe and all,

please forgive my ignorance, but... while I see why it might be good sometimes to have the UI on screen look the same as on paper, I fail to understand how to handle the dynamic aspects: it seems that the answer is supposed to be "using a smart engine that will do the work behind the scenes", but practical evidence suggests that this is *very* difficult to do (if possible at all) unless one is ready to accept even ugly results. The reason why it is difficult is that an automatic engine has to assess how "beautiful" a layout would look to a person - I don't think this is researched enough...

Maybe I just misinterpreted what you all were saying, and there are two different threads on the same conversation: (1) the UI look that has to be beautiful, just like printed matter; (2) automatically building UIs from an abstract representation, that will look good on screen and paper.

<< Is it meaningful to use a common representation for screen and paper UI? Aren't those media used for completely different purposes? Why would I want to print a file-open dialog, for example? I mean, it makes sense for text, documents, and such, but UI? Do we mean different things by UI? >>

best regards,
Vlad