Re: [rgui-dev] Idea for binding to the low level api

[Massimiliano Mirra]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 05:09:14AM -0700, Curt Hibbs wrote:
> > <interface>
> >   <section level="1">
> >     <title>Blah</title>
> >
> >     <switch id="SomethingOnOff" title="Something"></switch>
> >   </section>
> > </interface>
> This is similar to Mozilla's XUL (XML User-interface Language). I spent all
> of 2001 and most of 2002 developing a large client-server application using
> XUL.

Curt, could you please post a small snippet of XUL?  It was mentioned
on ruby-talk when I brough up the subject, but I gather it is
processed at runtime, isn't it?  Also I wonder in what terms it
thinks, whether widgets or more abstract entities.

> One of the problems with XUL is that it is very verbose. Its very easy for
> important information and structure to get lost in a sea of tags and text.
> Decent GUI-building tools could compensate for this.

Yes, and we're also not bound to XML-like markup.

> But the biggest problem was mixing the specification of the GUI components
> and layout (the XML tags) with the specification of their behavior (using
> JavaScript event handlers).

We might not need that at all.  The interface description could stay
static and unresponsive, just providing well defined id's.  Then the
behaviour part of the interface would be defined in Ruby only once,
separately from the description.

Massimiliano