doc.mashweb.club – CSS

Zen-White-Paper: Zen vs. current WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM web-page composers

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Present-day WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM web page composers immediately confront the user with page structure details, requiring the user to optimize his web page prematurely. A palette of HTML elements dominates the web page under construction with these composers. The user can “paint” a web page with elements from the palette. Some of these composers strew the page view with icons representing HTML elements.

Zen will take a different approach. In Zen, HTML elements making up the web page will represent themselves at the top-level view, with all the obscurity of detail that implies. Still, when Zen’s node browser is open, Zen will try to show a picture of the web page with all the all block boxes, inline boxes, and inline-block boxes⁴³ visible. Possibly it will do this by temporarily restyling all borders and margins (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Screenshot of a node-browser prototype. Click to open the live demo in a new window.

Zen will model other display styles besides block, inline, and inline-block in a subsequent release. Zen will provide whatever kinds of object-browsers are necessary to unobscure details of the page-as-an-object. Although the details have not yet been worked out, hope and inspiration are provided by the 3D View tool, and by the Tilt 3D add-on, for the Firefox browser (Figures 8a and 8b). The author does not mean these screenshots to represent the paradigm that Zen will use.

Other display styles besides block, inline, and inline-block will be modeled by Zen in a subsequent release. Zen will provide whatever kinds of object-browsers are necessary to unobscure details of the page-as-an-object. Although the details have not yet been worked out, hope and inspiration are provided by the 3D View tool, and by the Tilt 3D add-on, for the Firefox browser (Figures 8a and 8b). These screenshots are not meant to represent the paradigm that Zen will use.

Figure 8a. Screenshot of the Firefox 3D View tool for Firefox versions prior to Firefox 47.

Figure 8b. Screenshot of the Tilt 3D Add-on for Firefox.

The user will be able to select any node that can be the target of a mouse event. In node-selection mode, passing the mouse pointer over nodes will highlight them one at a time (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Layout-manipulator prototype. Click to open the live demo in a new window.

When the user wants to add an HTML element to his web page, Zen will first present a choice of block, inline, and inline-block box types, because in Zen’s paradighm, the visual behavior of a box is mainly determined by its display style, not by HTML tag type. The priority of display style over tag type in the visual behavior of a box is illustrated by the w3schools.com’s “Tryit Editor” page for converting <li> HTML elements into a horizontal navigation bar. Using Zen’s paradigm, with virtually zero learning, the user could intuitively mock up a web page using only block, inline, and inline-block boxes, and convert it piece by piece into semantic markup. Or he could set the HTML element tag of each element immediately when adding it to the web page.

Zen will allow the user to inspect and manipulate these boxes in a way pioneered and developed by Smalltalk and Smalltalk variants, using inspectors and browsers to inspect live web-page objects. For a relatively gentle introduction to Smalltalk-style inspectors and browsers, see Cincom Smalltalk’s tutorials (Figures 10 and 11). The specific HTML tag of an HTML element will be a detail to be drilled down to rather than a primary detail of interest.

Figure 10. Cincom Smalltalk Inspector Tool overview tutorial video. Click to open in a new window.

Figure 11. Cincom Smalltalk Browser Tool overview tutorial video. Click to open in a new window.

Zen will take an embedded, instant-feedback, hybrid WYSIWYM-WYSIWYG (not “pure” WYSIWYG) approach to pull the authoring of novel, Semantic-Web applications out of the exclusive province of programmer-specialists and put it into the hands of amateurs and dilettantes (in the original, non-pejorative sense of the words). The Zen project will primarily focus upon working with the “purest” web technologies—HTML and CSS—rather than backend technologies like web servers and web frameworks, because the back-end web framework or web server is opaque to JavaScript running in the web page. That is, the JavaScript running in the page has no way to affect the operation of the back end unless specific arrangements have been made for it. Zen will work by providing updates to web-page source in some format. Where web-page source is persisted and how it is used to generate the web page Zen is embedded in will not be the concern of Zen, though a reference implementation for that will be developed along with Zen.

In spite of these strict limitations, Zen as a building block for web servers and web frameworks is anticipated to be a game-changing addition to present-day website and web-app techniques. In some cases, Zen might even be developed to itself reflect changes to content, structure, and style back to sources, using a bit of code on the back end (i.e. on the web server). Perhaps, for example, in WebDAV-enabled websites—Zen could relatively easily be leveraged to rewrite web-page source, including stylesheets. On the other hand, using Zen only as a low-level, embedded, solid building block, it should be possible to augment web frameworks of many types to achieve a new, higher level of interactivity and customization in web applications.

None of the well-known WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM page editors directly support the creation of web applications. The most radical aspect of Zen will be that it will allow simple, sequential programs to be created and edited using a block representation of the program’s abstract syntax tree (AST),⁴² where blocks can be moved around using the same user interface Zen will provide for moving web page elements, with minimal modifications. Zen will accomplish this unusual feat by implementing a version of Scheme language in JavaScript, along with true continuations,⁴⁵ various supporting functions written in JavaScript, and some resources like icons. The author has already used such continuations to string together JavaScript event handlers to create a small sequential program without resorting to callbacks, continuatinon-passing style, promises, or state machines. Scratch⁴⁶ and Snap!⁴⁷ (formerly called BYOB) demonstrate that even young children can program using a cleverly designed visual programming language (Figure 12).

Figure 12. The Snap! visual programming language. Click to open in a new window.

Zen-White-Paper: Zen vs. website builders

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It is important to characterize and visualize how Zen will be different from “website builders” and WCMSs like Wix.com and Weebly.com. In contrast to such WCMSs, which prescribe construction methods at the level of business type, templates, plugins, modules, fonts, etc., Zen will give the user ultimate control of detail at the element/node/NodeList level of web pages. Zen will allow a DOM node to be grabbed and “dragged” to different positions in its containing NodeList because this is the simplest metaphor for that operation. Drag-and-drop is a classic feature of direct-manipulation interfaces (DMIs) and this metaphor of “moving” an HTML element or node is so compelling that we have to look at the code to see that the element has not moved in terms of x and y coordianates, but rather in terms of its cardinal position in a NodeList. Zen will allow a DOM node to be “cut and pasted” to any valid position in the DOM—an interaction between multiple NodeLists. An HTML element’s style has four possible, well-supported values for its display property: block, inline, inline-block, and none. Live demo code to implement GUIs to rearrange element positions in the NodeLists of the first three of these display styles is located on the author’s GitHub Pages here, here, and here. (Right-click on the links to open the pages in new tabs or windows.) The method of sliding elements in these prototype GUIs was partly inspired by the 15 Puzzle and JavaScript-based implementations of the 15 Puzzle. There are notes about some of these implementations on this website. Below is a screen recording of Jamie Wong’s AI-based automated 15-Puzzle solver, which is written solely in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS (Figure 13).

Figure 13. Jamie Wong's 15-Puzzle solver.

Presently, the customization of templates, plugins, and modules for website builders and web CMSs and the creation of novel comment systems, forums, wikis, and presently unimagined communication systems are far outside the bounds of casual web authorship.

Zen-White-Paper: Values

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The values driving Zen’s development are:

Creating novel, beautiful, well-formatted, semantic HTML and CSS should be dead simple.
Amateur web authors should easily create virtually any page structure and style.
The interface should have a virtually zero learning curve, and zero should mean zero. Zen must leverage well-known interface metaphors and gestures to the hilt. The “principle of least surprise” should be followed.
Zen should not clutter its interface for manipulating and creating semantic and presentation structure with every possible detail. Zen should hide details until they are needed; it is better to let the user drill down to these details than to present them by default.
The interface should have two mutually exclusive modes for semantics and styling. The semantics mode should hide page styling information and help search engines “understand” the page’s subject matter to classify it for the sake of web seekers. Styles will set fonts and colors and the interaction of the page’s elements with other elements and with the height and width of the page.
The interface should have two mutually exclusive modes: a semantics mode and a styling mode. The semantics mode should hide page styling information. The styles will set the looks of the page and the interaction of the page’s elements with such things as other elements and the height and width of the page. each other and the The clear and proper semantic structure will help search engines “understand” the page’s subject matter to classify it. The other mode should hide the semantics and focus on the look and feel of the web page. The look and feel is
Meta organization, like themes, templates, or partials,²⁸ ^,²⁹ ^,³⁰ ^,³¹ ^,³² ^,³³ ^,³⁴ should not be precluded by the structure of Zen’s low-level tools. Zen should empower the creation of these, even if not directly implement them.