Towards the Layout of Things

Abstract

When writing a user interface (UI), the layout of its elements play an important role. Programmers should be able to specify the layout of UIs in an intuitive way, while being able to separate the concern of laying out the UI from the rest of the software implementation. Ideally, the same layout language can be used in multiple application domains, so the programmer only has to learn one set of layout concepts. In this paper we introduce such a general-purpose layout language. We obtain this language by abstracting from a layout language we have introduced in previous work for declaratively de ning Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). We show that this abstract layout language can be instantiated for multiple domains: the SVG library by which the language is inspired, ncurses-based text-based user interfaces, and iTasks. In all of these cases, a separation of concerns is maintained.

Maintaining Separation of Concerns Through Task Oriented Software Development

“…One such editor is fromSVGEditor with which a scalable vector graphics (SVG) [9] Image [3] can be created from the required model and view values and keeps them 'in sync' (updView and updModel). Finally, the programmer can overrule the generated layout of task UIs with local annotations [4].…”