I'm reading "Presentation Based User Interfaces", the dissertation and later revisions in which Eugene Ciccarelli laid the foundations of GUI frameworks such as Dynamic Windows of Symbolics Genera and CLIM.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6946
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41161/AI_WP_219.pdf
@amoroso one of few things that are still worth incorporating (and I plan to do that eventually) are recognizers - they would allow for rapid prototyping with the system assistance.
Isn't the recognizer just the piece that (for example) takes the pointer location and figures out what object it correlates to? In which case CLIM already contains a recognizer. Well, I haven't read the paper so I'm probably barking up the wrong tree.
Semi-related, I have wondered many times about the relationship between the modern web and CLIM and how hard it would be to implement a CLIM-like programming interface for making web apps. That is, to get the much fancier interfaces that the web offers together with the high-level programmer interface provided by CLIM. Has this been done already?
I've attached a screenshot from the paper. Recognizers work ~like this:
Say that you have a rectangle, and inside a few output records with text put one below another.
A recognizer could suggest that the top-level rectangle is a frame, then infer that text one below another are paragraphs of a single body of text. According to the paper this process would be interactive where the user can modify system inferences, so that would be like a dialog.
Regarding CLIM on the web, I'm experimenting with porting #McCLIM directly to a browser using #ecl (that works as an webassembly program) treating <div> elements of certain class as sheets etc.
@jackdaniel I'm not yet familiar with recognizers, so this is something to keep in mind when reading the document.
