Blending Structured Graphics and Layout

Conventional windowing environments provide separate classes of objects for user interface components, or "widgets," and graphical objects. Widgets negotiate layout and can be resized as rectangles, while graphics may be shared (not just strictly hierarchical) transformed, transparent, and overlaid. This presents a major obstacle to applications like user interface builders and compound document editors where the manipulated objects need to behave both like graphics and widgets. Fresco[1] blends graphics and widgets into a single class of objects.We have an implementation of Fresco and an editor called Fdraw that allows graphical objects to be composed like widgets and widgets to be transformed and shared like graphics. Performance measurements of Fdraw show that sharing reduces memory usage without slowing down redisplay.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: UIST
• Authors: Steven H. Tang, Mark A. Linton
• Keywords: Graphical Objects, Software Engineering, UIST 1994, User Interface, Widgets Negotiate Layout