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.

doc.mashweb.club – metaphor

Zen-White-Paper: Zen vs. website builders

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

Zen-White-Paper: Values