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.

Zen-White-Paper: Principles

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As pointed out by David Ungar (who pioneered the type of prototypal object system that JavaScript uses), from values derive principles and from principles derive practices.³⁵ ^,³⁶ We have just explored the values behind the Zen system. Now let’s examine the principles of the Zen system. Zen will complement the approach of Lively Kernel,³⁷ ^,³⁸ which shares Zen’s principles 1–3 as listed below. How much, if any, of Lively Kernel’s code it will borrow is yet to be determined. Note, in particular, the following principle 11 of Zen that is different than the principles of Lively Kernel:

It will run in any browser without a download or installation. (Sometime in the future, an attempt might be made to make it work in mobile browsers.)
It will be a composition environment, a GUI builder.
It will store its apps as web pages.
It will compose web pages using the DOM’s interfaces and APIs³⁹ ^,⁴⁰ but not SVG or Canvas drawing operations.
Zen will allow its composition objects and simple programs to be inspected and edited via a Squeak-like object inspector.⁴¹ Zen will, by default, hide its visual programming environment. When visual programming is enabled, Zen will use HTML elements like DIV to model nodes in the program’s abstract syntax tree (AST).⁴² Zen will enable these program nodes or blocks to be copied, pasted, and rearranged, just like the ordinarily visible parts of a Zen web page.
It will enable its users to easily compose sequential programs, that is, programs that can wait for external, asynchronous events such as user input or I/O. Zen will synchronize its user’s sequential programs through Scheme continuations in an interpreter running on top of JavaScript in the web browser. (See below.)
Zen will be loadable into any web page as a library, although caution will be required to ensure compatibility.
It will complement, augment, and interact with existing web page editors and website builders, not replace them.
It will allow the Zen-editing of a web page to be locked, leaving intact the form and behavior it built inside the web page.
Zen will not add more than 1–3 seconds to a web page’s TTI (time to interact).
Zen will not follow Lively Kernel’s principle of implementing a scene graph.³⁷ Instead, it will leverage the CSS2 visual formatting model⁴³ and CSS3 features implemented by A-grade web browsers⁴⁴ to model a document in a web browser.

doc.mashweb.club – values

Zen-White-Paper: Values

Zen-White-Paper: Principles