Frontend technologies / Let's produce lots of mockups!

[savolai]

I'd love to see any ideas you might have how the design concept could be developed further.

Please submit demos about how to visualize different corner cases! Also all sorts of storyboards on how the interaction could work in your mind would be great! We can find the best solutions together. May the best design justifications win. :)

[samsullivan]

I might try to whip up simple HTML/CSS concepts, based on your image concepts, in the repo some time this week. That may be easier for us to iterate and fork than everyone working on images (obviously, feel free to keep working on images if that's easier for you).

[savolai]

That sounds good, actually! I tried to whip up CSS "back in the day" for this but it didn't quite flex the way I wanted to at the time. I guess it might have evolved a lot since then.

[savolai]

Actually, would it be smart to create say, angular-style custom html elements corresponding to regex elements, to make composition of prototypes even more straightforward?

[savolai]

Another upside with being able to produce HTML mockups is that a rich tooltip library can be used. Actually we can make this regex syntax explain itself quite easily! :)

[BHouwens]

Have we considered using React components? They seem to be well suited to what we want, without the other overhead of Angular.

But yes, I reckon there's a tonne of cool stuff we could do to make the syntax understandable. I'm excited :)

[savolai]

Personally, I am not familiar with react components. Are they similar to web components/polymer? I am mainly just interested in the availability of custom tags to make generating prototypes easy and having a clean separation of concens (visuals in CSS, functionality in JS).

The decision between the evils of either google or facebook is something I am happy to debate. It is also one which I believe at the moment I will ultimately leave to you and potential other deep developer minds. :)

[BHouwens]

They are similar in that they are custom-named components which you can inject logic into yes. The only possible concern might be that it mixes HTML and JS in a way I think most devs find uncomfortable at first.

In the end, I think having custom tags to modularise our components is a good idea, and all these libraries/frameworks can do that so either way I think it'll be fine. But I'll defer to anyone with better reasons for using one over the others.

[samsullivan]

Yea, I think it would be smart (especially for an end product) to use some framework for creating custom elements. I'm most comfortable with Angular, but haven't needed to make any custom elements in it (legacy browser limitations). Before, I always thought Polymer was the best for doing this, but would be happy to look into React.

[savolai]

One venue that would be exciting to explore: What kinds of educational settings might collaborative live regex editing enable? Would that suggest meteor? Has angular and react support. https://react-in-meteor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[BHouwens]

That might be a really cool option. Another option could also be three-way data binding to Firebase, as Angular has really good support for it and it's easy to use. I think a collaborative idea is really neat though... worth thinking about for sure.

[savolai]

There's the decision about binding ourselves to a commercial actor though.

[BHouwens]

Oh yes you're right, forgot Firebase at scale. Meteor would probably be better for that then.