UI toolkits for Python

[Paul Boddie]

Steve Holden wrote:

[80/20 rule]

> This is as much an economic decision as a marketing one, but a good engineer
> knows instinctively that there is a desirable cut-off point beyond which
> adding further functionality is a waste of engineering effort.

But Mike Meyer's point was that the Web standards are designed to allow
fancy functionality where it's available but for the experience to
degrade gracefully where such functionality isn't available. For
example, you have all the "events module" attributes in XHTML, but take
away the events capability in the browser and there's a decent chance
for the semantics of the application to remain the same: no, you don't
get instant updates of the page when you select some menu item, but the
user can still have a similar experience which involves slightly more
inconvenience - they have to submit the page and get back an updated
version from the server.

It's misleading to claim that designing in such a way requires huge
additional development, especially since the standards are constructed
in such a way to facilitate such designs. It goes without saying that
implementing advanced functionality on Netscape 3.x and NCSA Mosaic
would be a costly and ultimately non-viable burden, but that isn't the
issue for many Web applications and wasn't the point being made.

Paul