Widgets Working Group
Our goal is to facilitate VRML widget creation, customization, reuse, and
dissemination. Good UI designers and strong VRML hackers are dispersed
across the web, and their widget-building efforts are often duplicated
and/or non-interoperable.
Goals
VRML does not provide a consistent user interface or high-level UI
building blocks, i.e. widgets. A common set of such widgets will
facilitate world authoring and provide a consistent interface to
worlds using them. We wish to avoid inflicting the same look on worlds
incorporating these widgets and to make these widgets useful for
purposes as yet undetermined, therefore they must be easily
customizable, extensible, and composable.
We will develop a component-based architecture for reusable, interoperable
widgets, and create a widget repository to store, document, and classify
these widgets. The working group will classify widget submissions
according to some taxonomy, which will be designed in the course of the
working group. The working group will also create a core set of widgets
that demonstrates the use of the widget repository and exemplifies the
recommended architecture.
The widgets produced by this working group should be a starting point for
further innovation. For these widgets to be useful, they must be centrally
stored and easy to locate specific widgets; this includes both the widgets
produced by this working group and subsequent additions to the collection.
|
Date
|
Deliverable
|
|---|
|
6/21/97
|
Core Widgets Alpha
|
|
6/25/97
|
Theoretical Architecture Draft 1
|
|
6/28/97
|
Taxonomy Draft 1
|
|
7/11/97
|
Widget Repository Alpha
|
|
7/18/97
|
Core Widgets Beta
|
|
7/25/97
|
Final Theoretical Architecture
|
8/3/97
(SIGGRAPH'97)
|
Widget Repository Beta (public release)
|
|
9/5/97
|
Final Taxonomy
|
|
9/19/97
|
Final Core Widgets
|
|
10/3/97
|
Widget Repository Final Release
|
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Ongoing
|
Widget Submission Cataloguing
|
|
Ongoing
|
Website Maintenance
|
Description
The Widgets Working Group is an initiative to provide developers and users
with a fundamental, freely available set of standard user interface widgets
and a theoretical framework supporting these and all VRML widgets.
Identifier
The Widgets Working Group is officially known as vrml-widgets.
Co-Chairs:
Contact Information:
To join the mailing list, send mail
to vrml-widgets-request@zing.ncsl.nist.gov with subscribe in the
message body. This list is expected to move to vrml.org eventually, but is
temporarily on my server due to response time concerns.
Miscellaneous
A list and description of deliverables can be found here.
A list of resources can be found here.
Back to the main WWG page