Re: [Plastic-devs] Select or show colums message

[Doug B. <db...@cf...>]

On Jul 19, 2006, at 7:55 PM, John Taylor wrote:

> To take a specific example.  Topcat could do one of two things with a
> bunch of columns: create a new subset based on them, or create a plot
> (2D or 3D depending on the number of columns).
> It would register as understanding
> ivo://votech.org/votable/selectCols#plot
> ivo://votech.org/votable/selectCols#new_subset
>
> The fragment string is completely defined by Topcat - no other 
> agreement
> is needed with any other application, and no other application needs to
> understand what it means.  Instead, the sending application (e.g. Weka)
> strips off the fragments and uses them to populate its UI.  Thus it
> might offer the user the following options for the selected columns:
> send cols -> topcat -> plot
>                                -> new_subset
>                -> tabview-> highlight
>                -> Anomaly Detector
>
> [assuming tabview has registered with selectCols#highlight, and Anomaly
> Detector has registered just with selectCols]
> The appropriate fragment is then tacked on to any sent messages.

This is more a user interface thought than anything deep or meaningful.

Given that the fragment is application specific, does this mean you 
have to have descriptive fragments, so that the UI of the sending 
application can provide enough info for a user to know what each 
particular specialization does? In the example above, "plot", 
"highlight" are easy, and "new_subset" is obvious enough but the 
underscore makes it look ugly (from a UI view). An alternative would be 
to add a way to ask the receiving application for a descriptive string 
for a given fragment so that this could be used by the UI (maybe even 
title and description if you wanted to add "tooltips" or some other 
such mechanism).

Doug