Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
danmaz74 · 2013-05-25
· Original
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I'm an engineer too, and many years ago I read a book that I really found illuminating: http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Visual-Interfaces-Communicat...
The examples about applications design are outdated, but the principles and clarity of exposition are still top notch.
Out of curiousity, why don't browsers have pluggable layout managers? Like Java's AWT/Swing LayoutManager. [1]
Fussing with CSS and Java's stock layout managers (gridbag, table) always fills me with frustration and anxiety. In my experience, for the fussy work, it's easier to explicitly code what I want.
Ages ago, inspired by Designing Visual Interfaces [2], I made a layout manager [3] for canonical design grids [4].
It was pretty neat. Fluent API. Always visually correct. All the baselines aligned just so. Predictable results. Perfect for banging out CRUD forms. [5]
1/ https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.desk...
2/ https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Visual-Interfaces-Communica...
3/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110302212909/http://java.net/p...
4/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110308034949/http://designgrid...
5/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110515182322/http://wiki.java....