Putting it All Together

XML can affect all aspects of an application's UI design. This chapter touched on a few of those areas: layout, navigation, and user input controls. Your UI, however, need not stop there in its use of XML. From modeling generic user actions to creating drag-and-drop targets, XML can have an impact on your application and development timelines in a variety of ways. Thoughtful use of the technology can cut the time to delivery of a project in half as well as make your application much more maintainable over the long haul.

XML encourages you to think about your UI in a more abstract way, which leads to a more modular and generic design that can be adapted to new situations and requirements. In this chapter we used XML to model various aspects of our UI. In the case of the WYSIWYG text area, we saw how to extend the implementation of that model to provide additional functionality. In Chapter 7 we will examine how to use XML for sending messages between different applications.

Figure 6-13 Smaller versus larger option sets (larger set).