Musings on an Erlang GUI System.

[Vlad Dumitrescu (EAW)]

>   I never said that it would be good  for a GUI to look the same as on
> paper - I said I wanted  to use the same descriptive language for both
> - I don't  want to have  to learn *two*  languages, one for  layout on
> paper the other for making GUIS - I just want to lean one language.

Ah, okay, now I see what you mean. Of course, it makes sense now!
 
> 	3) GUIs and paper involve the layout in 2 dimensions of various
> things (text, lines, dots, ...) - I would like there to be 
> *one* language for
> describing 2D layouts - not several different languages.

I understand what you say, but I can't help getting a feeling that there is some hidden issue here... can't put my finger on it though... maybe it's still me not getting it completely. I will borrow your braindump form of expression, maybe it's going to be comprehensible :-)

<dump>
How handle the concept of Z-order? "this thing is behind that one" - the layout is the same, but different aspect.

What are the things layed out? Text, lines, dots -- they need to be grouped together too (even if there is no concept of "widgets"). Standard groups could be found in libraries, maybe modeling today's UIs.

Probably groups/widgets will be used a lot as such, then the basic language will be hidden behind these higher-level abstractions. Since paper and screen will probably have different higher-level abstractions, then in practice there will be a diference anyway. Who will notice that it's the same ground-level language? 

If one is using this language directly, won't that be like programming in Assembler? Higher levels are more fun (a personal opinion :-)
</dump>

regards,
Vlad