Description Dinko Ivanov 2011-03-16 03:25:11 EDT

It would be great to externalize as much as possible graphical notation properties. This means that developer of the diagram editor won't hardcode margins, sizes, colors, fonts, background images etc. but will leave it for a designer to create a theme CSS, which when applied will change the look & feel of a diagram. The CSS might contain locators for certain graphical elements in the framework or might locate specific diagram element to apply style only to it. The developer might still specify graphical properties, and in my opinion they should override those defined in CSS. Such CSS theme might be reused to provide unified L&F for a set of editors/tools.

The overall goal and benefit of this decoupling would be that less technical people, like usability experts and graphical designers might be directly involved in the development of a diagram editor product, thus increasing team productivity.