Wouldn’t Nib-ware be Great for Web Pages?
Today I spent a good chunk of the day creating a page in my web app from two other pages. It's a request I received from a user that wants to see both views of the data, but wants to pack it in on the display - screen real estate being what it is on most desks. What I kept thinking while I was doing this is: Why isn't this easier?.
I'd love to see nib-ware for the web. Something where I can build a self-contained "widget" that I can drop into pages with a few personalizations. I suppose it's possible with the Google Visualization Widget toolkit, but I didn't think of that until just now. Maybe I'll look into it. What did come to mind was Interface Builder nib-ware: drop-in boxes of functionality that can be customized and then used over and over. The low-level details are all handled in the implementation of the widget.
This gets back to the idea of having an Interface Builder for HTML/JavaScript/AJAX systems in the first place. Something where I can create functions (or at least stubs of functions) and then hook the outlets and actions up so that a clicking of a checkbox fires of some action like hiding an element, or clicking on a button grabs the value of a textbox and adds it to a list... stuff that you can do in IB, but can't really do it HTML.
Of course, the trick is that the rendering is the biggie. That's where all these JavaScript and HTML toolkits and frameworks come in. I guess it's getting there - slowly, but it'd sure be nice to be able to use something like IB for this. It sure would make it a lot easier.