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, 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.
structure structured graphics graphics layout windows environments class object user interface component widget sharing transparency applications user interface builder documentation implementation performance measurement memorialized object-oriented graphics user interface toolkit