Look and Feel - MORE's cascading style rules

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 88

Posted by jfaughnan
1999-08-11 12:53:51

Brad, I think you’re talking about elegance of design. It’s the stuff Norman wrote/writes about, and it was very much a part of the Macintosh. MORE is a great example of design elegance in software. Norton Commander was the same way (DOS utility), GrandView too, even, in its own peculiar way, WordPerfect/DOS 4.2.

QuickTime 4.0 might be a good example of good looks, bad design. (At least that design failure has some class—the Windows utilities for volume control, Microsoft Volume Control, is my world-class nominee for bad design and it’s ugly too.)

Outlook 98 has a pretty face, but it’s innards are ugly as ... (OK, Dave said to be nice :-)

One thing I loved about MORE was the cascading rules for style and formatting. You could add rules at the top level of the outline, and they’d cascade downwards until a new rule over-rode the original. The editor for applying rules, and saving them, was exceedingly powerful. (Since we’re supposed to be nice, I’ll leave the comparison to Word 98’s style sheets for the imagination.)

If nothing else, MORE 3.1’s style sheet would be a terrific example for someone doing Cascading Style Sheets for an HTML editor. Seems someone ought to ‘borrow’ that model. Maybe they could put an acknowledgement somewhere ...

john

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