Tantek-Mozilla-Projects

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Revision as of 00:19, 28 May 2010 by Tantek (talk | contribs) (→‎UI Styling: clarify ands for rich native-app UI control scenario)
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Hi, I'm Tantek Çelik, and you've found my list of projects that I'm working on with Mozilla.

I'm currently (as of 2010-146) a Mozilla contractor working with Chris Blizzard, Arun Ranganathan, and the web standards team, focused on specification work, especially around web applications user interfaces and social/identity open web technologies.

In particular:

Web Apps UI

UI Styling

At a high level there are two general clusters of use cases that web pages/apps want/need to solve in terms of user interface fidelity.

1. Beautiful Built-in Tweakable Controls. Pages that have some interactivity where the designer wants to use the built-in set of semantic user interface controls/inputs as long as they can just "tweak" them to match their web page/site design, e.g. color, background, typography. As long as the look and feel of built-in controls is beautiful enough both by default and with minor tweaks, then the hypothesis is that web designers will be happy/content to use built-in controls rather than go the extra mile to re-build custom controls with divs and javascript etc.

Some data for this hypothesis: default iPhone/iPad controls are pretty enough that most developers are more than happy to use them - the default controls make their apps look beautiful, polished, without much work/tweaking (modulo layout/sizing etc.) If we can achieve that same experience with built-in controls, the theory is that most web designers will be happy to stick with built-in controls + CSS.

2. Rich native-app-like experiences. Games. Media interfaces like WinAmp. There are always going to be some user interfaces where the developer wants nearly total control of the look and feel. In this case I'd like to see us figure out how to build hybrid controls that:

a) Are built with the closest semantic built-in control for any particular custom control, and

b) Use a <canvas> for drawing custom appearance, with DOM event handlers drawing control-specific state in the canvas, and

c) Have text-based fall-back in the canvas.

Example markup (event attributes/handlers omitted for simplicity) 

<button><canvas> Play </canvas></button>

(Now we just need a way to do that with text inputs too.)

The goal in this second scenario is to enable building rich native-app-like user interfaces where the path of least resistance to building it uses building blocks that in themselves enable accessibility. I think this is both possible, and is a necessary course of action to avoid having to do "bolt-on" accessibility later.


For now, the sections below focus on addressing/solving the first cluster of use cases first.

The theory is that by addressing that first that it will become more obvious which specific real-world rich interfaces fall into the second cluster, and therefore we can design for that second cluster based on those specific interfaces.

Styling HTML5 forms elements

Main Page: User:Mounir.lamouri/HTML5_Forms

Each HTML5 form element must be complete to the following criteria:

1. It must include pleasant and working UI, where appropriate.

This is a big design challenge. Take a look at what Opera has done for example (in terms of challenges). Here is a simple test page which shows default renderings - compare in various browsers and try interacting with the new widgets especially in Opera:

http://tantek.com/new-inputs.html

See HTML5/input for more <input> element tests.

2. You must be able to use CSS to style the element, especially the UI that we generate. This includes any pre-defined pseudo-selectors (invalid, required, icon, etc.)

Agreed, this is an absolute requirement.

Whenever there is any custom appearance of a form control, e.g. based on the new types, designers must be able to restyle them to fit in with their design. This means at a minimum:

  • ability to select specific "pieces" of any compound/composite form control for styling
  • ability to select specific "states" of any form control (may require ability to select states of specific pieces as well - that will be a challenge though as pseudo-elements themselves cannot have pseudo-classes in CSS)
    • existing Selectors UI pseudo-classes, and some notes on how HTML5 DOM property states trigger these pseudo-classes
      • :hover :active - based on mouse/pointer interactions. the challenge here is to find alternatives for touch based interfaces.
      • :focus - an element which is currently accepting keyboard, pointer, or other input device events.
      • :enabled and :disabled - based on the state of the "disabled" property on the element.
      • :checked - based on the "checked" property on input types "radio" and "checkbox", and also on the "selected" property on option element.
      • :indeterminate - based on the "indeterminate" property of the input types "radio" and "checkbox".
      • :default - default buttons or submit buttons
      • :valid and :invalid - input elements that are candidates for constraint validation and either do or don't (respectively) satisfy their constraints.
      • :in-range and :out-of-range - input elements that are candidates for constraint validation and that are neither under nor overflowing (for :in-range) or either under/overflowing (for :out-of-range).
      • :required and :optional - see HTML5 description of being required / required attribute
      • :read-only and :read-write - see HTML5 description of read-only vs read-write elements.
  • typography
    • font properties
    • text properties
    • color
  • box properties
    • width
    • height
    • padding
    • border
    • margin
    • background
    • box-shadow


3. If there's a constraint API the API must be complete.

4. It should be fully accessible.

CSS3 UI

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-ui/

CSS3 Color

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/

UI Layout

  • CSS3 Flex Box
    • need to get in touch with Tab Atkins and catch-up on the current state of his work vs. existing prefixed partial implementation in Firefox and Safari.


Social and Identity

Related Features

Features to work with:

  • Accounts Manager
  • ...

Standards and Communities

Standards and communities to engage with (recommended, unprioritized)

  • vCard 4 (IETF vcarddav)
  • hCard (microformats.org)
  • microdata vcard vocab (W3C/WhatWG)
  • OAuth (including OAuth 2, xAuth, OWF)
  • Portable Contacts
  • RelMeAuth
  • OpenID
  • WebFinger
  • Activity Streams
  • ...

Events

Events I'm planning on participating in accordingly:

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