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Skins Without Developers

By Daryl Tempesta, Lutris Technologies Senior Designer

Many UI Design professionals are about to wake the sleeping giant that is Enhydra XMLC. I bet a box full of orange hair dye that within a very short time any respectable application developer, particularly the graphic designers, will use nothing but XMLC. Now this may sound a bit optimistic in light of the dominant presence of JSP, but look around. Already we are seeing the fruits of this liberating Enhydra innovation. For the lucky who are familiar with the simple power and flexibility of XMLC, designers like myself have experienced a new world of opportunities.

Did you ever have to make up your mind? Choose one design and leave the other behind?

Well, I know firsthand what it means when a client can’t. By definition a successful beginning to any project means that the client had to choose between a couple of strong design concepts. When is one chosen, "let the design changes begin!" In the more challenging projects, the client makes changes up to the very last moment. Recently, I was working on a project where the actual design for the user interface would not be approved for production until 10 days before the application was scheduled to go live. I'm sure my experience is not unique.

Since the client chose Enhydra and XMLC, there was an excellent chance that we could meet our schedule despite the last minute changes. Basically I was performing plastic surgery on the key asset of this new dot com. Both of our companies would be affected by the outcome. As the approved design arrived we started immediately on this endurance race. We began by using the “HTML only” templates that were already being used for development and testing. They were retrofitted with a full range of graphic elements and changed miles of attributes. This included tweaks to colors, the resizing and repositioning of tables, along with many other other invasive things that would render the page unusable or broken if we had been using a JSP model technology.

Armed with only HTML knowledge and standard graphic design tools, the graphics were implemented at the same time the engineers were doing their work . When you were at the mall or airport, did you ever see a little tot on a leash, the other end being held by an over protective mother? It’s a shame that before now, world class, award wining designers needed to also be expert programmers or needed to have an engineer implement a UI in JSP or some other page heavy technology. With XMLC, I had autonomy.  The client was happy because they only needed to pay for one person to do the changes and my project manager was happy because she knew our client would award us with repeat business. I felt free.

It was so simple to implement, I found myself daydreaming while I was working. That's when I realized how absolutely powerful XMLC was. It was conceivable, probable and now a reality that any designer, anywhere, can create the complete “front end” of a web application. Design studios flush with graphic talent and with no engineer to be found, can now select any Enhydra XMLC-powered engineering firm, anywhere, and create next generation portals, sites, and apps. I predict that there will be a quick marriage between the best design houses/agencies and Enhydra shops around the world. You see, while Enhydra and XMLC represent the new best tool for engineers, designers can now develop projects at whatever pace is needed. More importantly, at any time, the design can be changed with minimal impact to the schedule. Before XMLC it would have been easier to stop a cow rollerskating down a hill with a spoon than meet these kinds of extreme time requirements.

For those designers who are not aware how to implement XMLC, my next few articles will go into the nuts and bolts of XMLC and show some helpful strategies and techniques for designers to implement.

Without XMLC, this is one project deadline that would have been missed. It would have been disaster for the project, the client and their investors. Amazing considering the client made changes to the design, even the day before it went live. We met our full implementation of the web application within the 10 days. Maybe the client doesn’t need to make their mind up after all. Either way, designers now have a tool to meet the growing demand for Internet design work; the giant is waking up.

Over the next year's worth of Lutris Enhydra Journals, we'll address some for-designers-only topics, including:

  • Skeleton, Build, Rebuild – Stages of development
  • Placing & Using XMLC – Simple technical use of span tags and ID attributes
  • Placing & Using XMLC – Intermediate Technical use of span tags and ID attributes
  • Get the most from your design – Branding techniques and emphasizes use of XMLC
  • Case Study: Successful company in action: themall.earthlink.net
  • In the news: worldwide coverage of XMLC adoption by Design agencies

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