Friday, August 27, 2010

[ldupgrjb] DOM-like graphics programming

In the very olden days, there was console output: plain successive lines of text.  After that came bitmap canvases.  Those were the simple days: simple is good for programmer understanding.

Inspired by, if not nearly identical to, DOM, HTML, and CSS, we could have a hierarchical tree whose leaves are rectangular (or even affine transformed) bitmap canvases.  It should be simple.  Like a web browser, the renderer will do things like automatic "character" wrapping if requested, as well as overlapping, transparency, clipping.  Create a graphics programming library based on this model: this has likely already been done, though nothing really good has caught my eye, yet.

Input is hard, so don't try to do it in the same window.  Maintain a separate console for keyboard input.  Maybe a totally different window, and library, which is for interaction with mouse input: the graphics primitives for this one should probably forbid overlapping regions, and maybe some automatic layout for Fitts Law.

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