[R-gui] Another R-GUI

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 11:20:35 +0100, you wrote in message
<MABBLJDICACNFOLGIHJOMEDGDBAA.phgrosje@ulb.ac.be>:

>Yes, Thomas, your are perfectly right: one has to establish a standard for
>describing dialog boxes. Your XML-file implementation is interesting. I
>don't think most complex dialog boxes should be constructed this way on the
>fly, but this should be useful for 95% of our needs. I am willing to add a
>page in http://www.r-project.org/GUI for proposing such a standard. Thomas,
>would you like to propose a draft? Does somebody else want to participate?

I'm also interested.  

The way I see XML is as a standard way of storing hierarchical
information.  I think complex dialog boxes should normally be
constructed hierarchically, so I don't see any problem with thinking
about all of them as being made of XML.  Internally, they may
sometimes be stored differently for efficiency reasons, but there
should always be a 1-1 map to XML, so that other standard tools can be
written to work on them.

I would say what we need is some flexibility.  Sometimes dialog boxes
would be constructed in a Delphi (or Visual Basic) drag-and-drop mode;
other times a user would want to be able to say "give me a dialog box
to ask about the elements of this list".  Both should be possible.

Duncan Murdoch