Re: [Perl-widget-developer] thoughts on design

[Stephen A. <ste...@of...>]

James,

Sounds like your thing is Themes.
We want the Themes concept to work its way into the PWL.
Please take a look at the software, Widget-0.01 found at

   http://www.officevision.com/pub/Widget/

Begin to understand the classes and the existing framework.
Then start proposing on this list

  1. a class or set of classes to implement Themes
  2. XML configuration format to configure Themes

When you understand how the PWL works and we all concur on
how Themes fits in, you can go berzerk.

Stephen

At 10:53 PM 5/31/2001 -0500, James G Smith wrote:
>Here are some thoughts and ideas I've had and played with in 
>various forms over the last few months regarding themeing and 
>html rendering.  Some things might be useful, some not.
>
>Background:  I am currently working on some PHP code to provide 
>an environment in which scripts can be independent from most 
>content which, in turn, can be independent of the look of the 
>page.  The theme object is called to render anything from form 
>input tags to tables.
>
>For a live example, browse https://neo.tamu.edu/xyzzy/ .  This is 
>a non-public alpha installation being used for current 
>development.  The Directory feature uses the theme object to
>render the list of found records in LDAP as well as the actual 
>record itself.  You could think of the list as a list widget that 
>the theme object provides for the script.
>
>I am currently developing a table rendered in PHP that will 
>render using <pre>..</pre> text instead of tables.  This will 
>allow for a theme that uses no tables for those browsers that 
>have a hard time rendering tables.
>
>In addition to providing some components/widgets for the scripts, 
>the theme object also handles the page layout.  At the moment, I 
>have enumerated 47 (16 with all edge content intact + 31 with 
>some edge component missing) different ways to layout a page with 
>central and edge content.  For example, the default look of the 
>above development site is as follows:
>
>+---------+
>|   Top   |
>+---------+
>|         |
>| Content |
>|         |
>+---------+
>|  Bottom |
>+---------+
>
>I don't have the proper data structure initialized for this 
>particular layout, but if I did, the user would have the choice 
>of having this rendered using frames or tables.  Currently, it 
>will only use tables.  This is done without the script or theme's 
>knowledge.
>
>http://hex.tamu.edu/test.php has three themes available for 
>demostration.  It also shows what the ldap directory object 
>returns from a successful lookup (me).
>
>Back to the Present:  I would like to bring as much of this logic 
>as possible over into the Perl world.  I think a widget system 
>would be a good way to do it.  A theme could possibly be a widget 
>factory -- I ask it for a widget that can draw a table, and it 
>gives me one.  I don't have to know what the package is or the 
>specifics of configuring it, as long as I can give it a set of 
>headers and the table contents and it can draw a table for me.
>
>I could give the theme object back a set of widgets and it could 
>render the page, allowing for the user to choose frames or no 
>frames (for example) without causing drastic problems in the code 
>composing the page.  Perhaps this could be done with the template 
>idea....
>
>Widgets could still be used outside of the widget factory, but 
>the code would need to know which widget it was using.  The 
>factory would need to be aware of all the types of widgets being 
>used in the site.  It could also handle the burden of doing the 
>general configuration of widgets, allowing the scripts to focus 
>on the items that make the widget unique/useful in their context.
>
>This could also be done (I think) parallel with other efforts 
>such as the Widget::HTML::Template idea (milestone 5).  The two 
>might even complement each other.
>--
>James Smith <JG...@TA...>, 979-862-3725
>Texas A&M CIS Operating Systems Group, Unix
>
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