Prototype OO was Re: Inheritance/defaulting of attributes

[Ken Meltsner]

I was thinking about my own comment (a dangerous idea), and came to the
conclusion that prototype OO would probably be best for a WYSIWYG-ish
document type definition system.  In the same way AMULET (Brad Myers's
package at CMU) allows you to design a user interface and change the
properties/presentation of the visible objects, a user could define new
elements that would provide the desired presentation, etc.  When saving
the file, the elements would then be queried to produce the XML element
definitions needed for the DTD.

My point is that it's possible to use an object-oriented approach to
manipulate document definitions interactively, and then generate
definitions in a form suitable for use by other systems.

Example:

User would insert a "user-name" element, but would change it to another
font.  Selecting the element, the user could define a new element
"internal-user-name" with the appropriate presentation and attributes
inherited from "user-name" but with the font changed appropriately.

I'm not sure whether prototype OO would make it easier to deal with
manually-created DTDs, but it would be a heck of a boost for
visual/WYSIWYG tool implementors.

Apologies if the above is clueless in any fashion,

Ken "Coming to XML development from a different world" Meltsner



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