[Sigia-l] Intelligent signs at Microsoft

[Terrence Wood]

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

I see a few inherent problems with this approach.

To summarise:
1. Programmers can't design, and designers can't program.
2. HTML is structural, Illustrator is visual.
3. The 4th dimension is not represented in Illustrator.


It's true XUL and MXML are both programming languages that can draw 
interfaces, but generally you need to be a programmer to use them. The 
rub is that *generally* programmers can't design interfaces for an 
audience of non-programmer types, and designers can't program. In broad 
strokes it comes down to the nature of the activity each discipline 
undertakes: programming considers edge cases and all the possible 
permutations of a system, design is concerned with the reduction of 
complexity into constituents understood by the masses.

Just like with Word, translation from one form to another requires a 
level of robustness in the originating document that is really 
achieved. 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.

Wireframes can be used to describe interaction but how do you marry 
that programmatically with a 2 dimensional visual representation of the 
UI? Generally it requires alot of imagination to communication the idea 
of interaction before building it.


kind regards
Terrence Wood.

On 16 Aug 2005, at 6:56 AM, Listera wrote:

> This is a perennial quest here: how does one turn wireframes, UI 
> prototypes,
> etc., done in a drawing app like Illustrator directly into functional
> markup, thereby eliminating the step where programmers essentially 
> recreate
> the drawings.
>
> Behold:
>
> <http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2005/07/12/438178.aspx>
>
> Michael Swanson at Microsoft (OK, on his own at nights) figured out a 
> way to
> output XAML from Illustrator. XAML is MSFT's declarative markup 
> language
> (like XUL in Moz and MXML in Flash/Flex) that'll drive graphics in the
> upcoming Longhorn/Vista.
>
> So if MSFT actually figures out the next intelligent step and can plug 
> in
> Illustrator output into XAML coding/authoring IDE, things would be
> interesting, to say the least.
>
> Ziya
> Nullius in Verba