Re: SIMILE Research Drivers

Hi David,

On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 02:50:50PM -0400, David R. Karger wrote:
> 
> Well, as a particular example, consider the drag and drop metaphor.
> In haystack, huge amounts of information is input to the system this
> way (eg, user drags "person" object onto "author" region of a
> document; system records that person as author of that document).
> This may well be possible to set up in javascript, but I suspect it is
> only the tip of the iceberg.

So I don't ever use IE and have no idea what it is capable of, but
in Mozilla drag and drop works fine between anchored objects in the
html text and form entry widgets, without even resorting to Javascript.
But drag and drop isn't a normal metaphor for web applications; there 
are better ways to represent this type of interaction on the web.

For example, to link two existing resources, the author could be entered 
by name for example, or selected from a list of authors using an edit 
form that allows you to select from the list of authors in the system 
or define a new one.  Or a workflow object similar to a shopping cart
could be used to collect authors in a bundle (while browsing through
authors) to be applied to a book at a later time.  

> 
> If we do feel forced to use a web browser paradigm, we may be able to
> get some way just by generating pictures of the haystack UI and using
> imagemaps to catch user clicks, but this is really just a poor man's
> X-server.
> 

That would be extremely bad web UI design.  

I think that the high points of web UI design are in its ability to
map across device and people capabilities.  The abstraction of markup
seperates display from data in a way that allows the same data to be
reused in many different ways, potentially by blind users, by users of
capability limited devices such as PDAs, by text terminals and other
mouseless devices, by WebTVs, by web crawlers, and by computer displays
of varying resolution.

Of these, generation of pictures from the Haystack UI voids approximately
all of the features of HTML.

Cheers,
-kls
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Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2003 16:26:31 UTC