Metawidget

Metawidget

With reference to GUI widgets, the term metawidget has been adopted for different purposes. It has been used to describe a 'widget of widgets', a 'widget about widgets' and also a 'widget for metadata'.

Widget of widgets

A widget that is composed of other (usually more primitive) widgets.

This is using the term meta in its epistemological sense, whereby it means "about (its own category)". For example, a Spinner widget could be implemented as a metawidget consisting of a Text box and two Buttons. An alternative term would be 'compound widget'.

Metawidget

[http://www.metawidget.org Metawidget] is an Open Source project that targets multiple widget toolkits. It mines an application's existing architecture and creates widgets native to its existing widget toolkit.

mkWidgets

[http://mkextensions.sourceforge.net/mkWidgets13.htm mkWidgets] is an Open Source project written for the Tcl/Tk framework. It provides a method for defining metawidgets, and includes a collection of pre-built ones.

Widget about widgets

A widget that chooses to be one of a range of possible widgets depending on requirements.

This is using the term meta in its slightly different interpretation, whereby it means "on (exactly its own category)". For example, a widget may choose to represent itself to the user as an image, as sound, or as various combinations and/or sequences of the two depending on the capabilities of the device [Blattner, Glinert, Jorge and Ormsby, 'Metawidgets: towards a theory of multimodal interface design'. Appears in "Computer Software and Applications Conference, 1992. COMPSAC '92. Proceedings, Sixteenth Annual International" ISBN 0-8186-3000-0.]

Widget for metadata

A widget that captures or displays metadata.

Fitnesse

FitNesse is a web server, a wiki, and a software testing tool. It has a class "fitnesse.wikitext.widgets.MetaWidget" for storing and editing metadata

Turbogears

TurboGears is a Python web application framework. It has a class "turbogears::widgets::meta::MetaWidget" for storing and editing metadata

References


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

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