[Sigia-l] Designers and Developers

[Listera]

lists:

> While I agree with the spirit of Listera's comments, I have an odd impulse
> to play devil's advocate:

No need to apologize, unless you use vulgarity, I don't feel personally
molested when you take issue me. :-)

> Developers and designers end up working very closely together when using tag
> libraries such as ASP.NET that render html/css/js from the backend.

This is an interesting point. It think it was BJ who compared my approach to
CSS (an interesting observation), but the notion of separating
content/structure/presentation is fundamental. If you're an avid advocate of
the MVC model like me, you'd find much to criticize in the degree to which a
lot of the tag-based languages (including ASP) mix code directives to
middleware within the markup (HTML). At first, this urge to mix feels
convenient but it's unscalable for large projects. This is carried over from
the horrid (legacy) practice of attaching actual code to UI controls in VB,
etc. However, it's quite possible to separate presentation layer from
business logic (to use the lingo). This will get extremely interesting when
we move to building apps (mostly) via declarative markup languages like XUL,
MXML and XAML instead of (traditional) code.
 
> Not only is the rendered output horrid, but now the developer is all mixed
> up in design issues and the designer is all mixed up in user controls,
> server controls, and data manipulation.

Yikes. That's why Macromedia and Microsoft are taking great pains to give
you the basis to separate them in their new app creation paradigms: Flex and
Avalon.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba