Re: Does one design for interactivity or content? [Scripts-TECHS]

Jim,

         My planning is more like Jonathan's too. I work from the content, 
then fit it into html (existing or needing to be created) Then I start on 
the html lead it (as I did for the lessons for Mom) .... but for a musical 
page I did yesterday I seem to be following your pattern .... started by 
making the midi, searched for the graphics with one theme  in mind, started 
the page, wrote out all the verses, and decided to change the theme of the 
illustrations, so back to the animation site, redid the page, reset the 
background music to play for all ten verses ... Check it out on 
http://www.erols.com/stevepem/OldMan . Now that it runs in html, the next 
step, I envision would be to add a script that would control the animation 
display so each numeral displays as that verse is played in the background 
midi loop (loop runs ten times ... (gotta take out that applause bar ... it 
grates to hear it ten times!) ... the page would work without it, but it 
would make it easier to use in a classroom?  ... So would a control for the 
background music. Is that a script, too?

         Checked out your http://jibbering.com/accessibility and hope Joe 
Clark add the link to his Blog

         In your photo gallery, I liked the ability to link from the large 
version back to the gallery, but it prevents the user from downloading the 
large image, if that is desired. To simulate a slide show, you could link 
from large image to large image, starting anywhere in the set from the 
gallery ...

                                                         Anne

At 10:12 AM 9/30/01 +0100, Jim Ley wrote:
>Jonathan Chetwynd asks some questions about:
>
>"Does one design for interactivity or content?"
>
>You can design for both, I'm never suggesting that you cannot design for
>interactivity or even start out with that in mind, just that in my
>experience, going through structural - presentational - dynamic phases
>seems to produce the best results.
>
>A page must have _content_, this may be some images and links to various
>resources, or it could be a list of products in an online store, or it
>could be a photo gallery (I'll use the photo gallery to illustrate the
>technique, as I played with this recently.)
>
>The first thing you do is get the structure down, now a set of
>images/links has little structure, unless there's a heirachy in it - the
>stores products may well be split up into sections each with header, then
>each product has an image and a description, a quantity box, all sorts of
>content, but has some structural relationship.  In the gallery the content
>are the thumbnails which link to the main images, perhaps again grouped
>into category, but at least with titles, perhaps longer descriptions
>available of the photos.   Marking up this gives us an ugly page but the
>content is well thought out structurally, it's readily apparent to someone
>with only HTML knowledge how to modify/add to this. No care over scripts
>or presentation is needed.  (This is important to me, developers don't
>want to have their time wasted performing minor edits to pages, it's
>inefficient and lessens the chance that the page would be updated, updates
>need to be simple, and there are no visual authoring tools I would.)
>
>Next we have the presentational, this would be done with a stylesheet, and
>you may need to add some CLASSes to the HTML, but that shouldn't change
>the structure, and if you choose sensible names, then editing could even
>be made clearer <p class="footnote"> etc.  Currrently this is only really
>visual, but the language support is there for aural etc.
>
>Finally we add the scripting - now in many pages there may be no value
>adding any scripting, but even where my sole aim was to develop a script
>solution, I still go through the previous 2 phases.  Assuming there is,
>you create the script, I do it without touching the HTML where possible
>(Classes again are most likely) - I don't like adding event handlers in
>HTML, mainly because of the user editing issue, copying one section as a
>basis of new content could break the rules I've set them and cause errors.
>It makes the page more intimidating to edit, and it makes the code less
>generic.  So I add them through the script, (which obviously has
>advantages aswell re users interacting with pages before the script is
>ready.)
>
>So how does this work in practice: A Photo Gallery example.
>
>Start with the HTML:
>That's simple, just images, maybe in a list, or tabular form, the very
>common idea is to have thumbnails linking to a full-size image in the form
>
><a href="someimage.jpg">
><img src="someimage_thumbnail.jpg" alt="A Swan" title="A Swan in Home
>Park">
></a>
>
>Then you add some CSS to turn the gallery into something that looks/sounds
>better.
>
>Finally you think, well that's a pretty lousy user interface, when you
>view the image in detail, you lose the context of the rest of the page,
>it's not in a nice frame etc. (in fact we knew this when we started out,
>that was the whole point of making a gallery...)
>
>So we add some scripting, many people have it open in a new window, my
>dislike of this technique is what prompted me to attempt a different
>solution, so I tried to address the advantages of this method without its
>limitations.
>
><URL: http://jibbering.com/accessibility/gallery.html >
>(You'll see I pretty much missed out the presentational phase, I have no
>talent in the area.)
>
>Is the result, now I currently have some other problems with it - keyboard
>navigation isn't correct, as enter doesn't clear the full-size image (due
>to focus still being on the link which opened it, it just opens it again.)
>and it  might be nice if we could provide a way to let the user queue up a
>series of images which are downloaded and presented as the action over a
>slow connection isn't ideal.
>
>So I hope I've explained in more detail what I meant by the original
>comment about how to design a page with script in, and perhaps you'll
>appreciate why I didn't feel at the time more able to write a full
>response, it's a little long, and I'm still not sure I've got my ideas on
>how to do it across.
>
>Jim.

Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

http://www.erols.com/stevepem
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 23:20:55 UTC