[Sigia-l] Intelligent signs at Microsoft

[Listera]

Terrence Wood:

> Well I hope it does a better job than MS Words attempts at producing
> HTML.

You missed the point on this one; perhaps you need to see the Ch 9 video
linked on that page to better understand the relationship/transformation.

HTML is a markup language. XAML (like XUL and MXML) is a declarative
language that is used to define UIs. XAML is not really a programming
language/executable.

> 1. Programmers can't design, and designers can't program.

That's debatable (well, I've been doing both for two decades :-) But the
point of Illustrator-to-XAML is *precisely* to bridge that gap that exists
for many. Designers continue to design in a tool they know, Illustrator. The
proposed plug-in converts one object model (.ai) to another (XAML).

> 2. HTML is structural, Illustrator is visual.

That's nonsense. Indeed, Illustrator is an extremely object oriented,
hierarchically structured app that allows you abstract drawing code in a
visual environment. It's this OO aspect that the plug-in uses to map
Illustrator's objects to XAML's, without such structure you wouldn't be able
to do it.

> 3. The 4th dimension is not represented in Illustrator.

One of the things that Michael demos in the video is precisely that: he
animates over time in XAML what was static in Illustrator, with a simple
time tween.
 
> It's true XUL and MXML are both programming languages

They are decidedly not programming languages, as their name suggest; they
are markup. Something else does the interpretation/rendering/execution.

> The rub is that *generally* programmers can't design interfaces for an
> audience of non-programmer types, and designers can't program.

Having noticed that, companies like Macromedia and now MSFT, apparently,
allow designers to work in their own environment and "export" the results so
that they seamlessly and natively become the input for programmers (via the
declarative markup).

> HTML is a structural language, and requires a structural source, whereas most
> documents are created purely in the visual plane, and UI's most certainly will
> be.

You are thoroughly confusing the visual *appearance* of a doc and the
underlying data format that produces it. An Illustrator drawing *no matter
what it depicts* is an *extremely* structured doc. Adobe has moved PDF (also
the basis for Illustrator docs) to XML over the last two years.

> Wireframes can be used to describe interaction but how do you marry
> that programmatically with a 2 dimensional visual representation of the
> UI? 

You need to watch the video.

I'd also recommend going over to the Macromedia site and watching some
videos of Flex to get a sense of how declarative languages drive UIs.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba