Sketching A Webpage With Denim

Sayten241 writes "Wired is running an article about a program from UC Berkeley in which website developers can literally sketch out a webpage using a tablet. The article states that Berkley felt that since so many web-developers sketch things out on paper before they begin, why not allow them to sketch on the computer? This program is not limited to websites however. It has also been used to help MIT design a Linux Interface (click the blue parts of the image to navigate through interface)."

Comments

re: Linux interface

[Tumbleweed]

Well...at least it looks better than KDE. ;)

*just joking!*

Great, now if they could only...

[stefanlasiewski]

Great, but now I need a computer program to help read the horrible handwriting.

I can see this thing being very useful for writing out doctor perscriptions :)

'Let's see, this script says 30 pills of Acetpoiunasd and 10 pilos of Hydroasdhkjh'. No problem!

Prior art :)

[Kickasso]

I know of a guy who sketched his website on some A4 sheets. Then he thought "heck, this is good, why waste an effort." He simply scanned these pages, added some code for navigation and that was it.

Re:Prior art :)

[RevAaron]

There is this Mac "HTML" editor that basically did this, but streamlined it- the whole process was done on the Mac. My gf had been looking for a free HTML editor before she pirated Dreamwaver or spent all day for a while in a lab at school working on her website with the school's copy.

You were given a white, blank page to begin with. You had various tools, and it looked like a drawing program. You put text on, images, etc, drawing them. It would work well with a tablet. Then you save. You'd think the tool wouuld save all the text as regular HTML text, but nope- it exported the *entire page* as an image, making an image map out of it with the text that was supposed to be linked, etc. Really seemed laughable.

Denim seems a bit cooler- it adds gesture recognition to this. ;) (and more, it'sa joke folks)

I am pretty sure this was an old version of Freeway for Classic Mac OS. There had to have been an option somewhere to have it emit HTML/images like a normal editor, or perhaps they've just upgraded it to that... But they're not out of business, and some people really like the tool so it must not be a totally crappiece.

Yay. I am so excited *sigh*

[billcopc]

So it's a Paintbrush toy with an HTML wrapper. Back in my day we called this Imageready.

Now if only it did OCR and converted lines into tables, then we'd be on to something. I can't keep track of the time wasted futzing with tables.

Penmanship

[WatertonMan]

Man. And I thought *my* handwriting was bad.

Tip to webmasters using this software. All that time you saved avoiding learning HTML, Dreamweaver or whatever you now have to invest in penmanship lessons.

Re:Now We'll Hear From All Those Coding Elitists..

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem comes when some idiot fails to do what we elitists do, namely generate documents that are not only W3C-valid HTML but can also be usefully rendered in a variety of unanticipated media.

Most "tools" for "non-techies" put out atrocious garbage like undefined codepoints (which appear to work but only if you're running Windows) and layout with no structure (so the document makes no sense unless you can render and view it in two dimensions and at a resolution and font size similar to the authors') and sometimes even defective markup (only certain user agents happen to have the error-handling behavior you're relying on).