Introducing Constraints into Web Layouts: Evaluating the Intuitiveness of Current Approaches for Designers

When it comes to web applications and their dynamic content, one seemingly common trouble area is that of layouts. Frequently, web designers resort to frameworks or JavaScript-based solutions to achieve various layouts where the capabilities of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) fall short. Although the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is attempting to address the demand for more robust and concise layout solutions to handle dynamic content with the recent and upcoming specifications, a generic approach to creating layouts using constraint syntax has been proposed and implementations have been created. Yet, the introduction of constraint syntax would change the CSS paradigm in a fundamental way, demanding further analysis to determine the viability of its inclusion in core web standards. This thesis focuses on one particular aspect of the introduction of constraint syntax: how intuitive constraint syntax will be for designers. To this end, an experiment is performed involving participants thinking aloud while reading code snippets. Also, cursor movements are recorded as a proxy for eye movement over the code snippets. The results indicate that, upon first-impression, constraint syntax within CSS is not intuitive for designers

Web based Data visualization for an Immersive 3D Therapy Game for Treating Hemispatial Neglect

Neglect affects an estimated one in four individuals who experience a stroke. Because of its association with overall stroke severity, individuals with neglect tend to have poorer prognosis for recovery. Treatment of neglect in acute stroke can yield greater recovery of a person’s ability to successfully perform activities of daily living. However, most individuals have insufficient access to effective treatments. Hemi-spatial neglect is a type of brain problem after stroke that people with this problem is living in a one-side world, which means they can only recognize one side of the object they see in their eyes, and automatically ignored the other side. Current existed treatment which is called Constraint Induced Movement Therapy (CI therapy) is to Hemi-spatial neglect is having the patient staying at hospital and repeat being forced to look at the side they tend to ignore by a doctor. This traditional treatment for hemi-spatial neglect is very tedious and a repetition of a motor practice thus has little effect on patients. Recently, game-based treatments for neglect have shown some important progress. We, as a team, designed an immersive 3D video game, which has very user-friendly interface and driven by eye gaze, in order to train them to look at the other side so that they may get a better chance to recover as normal people. This will provide direct, intensive, and implicit training of visual attention, while enabling real-time assessment of performance and feedback. The game is calibrated with The Eye Tribe Eye Tracker as a monitor to the movement of eyeballs and based on 3D modeling technology: Autodesk Maya with the assistance of Adobe Photoshop for creating game assets, and imported them to the Unreal Game Engine 4.0 and program the game with C++ and BluePrint visualized language.No embargoAcademic Major: Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Site-wide templates for Internet sites

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-68).This paper presents the design and implementation of a system to maintain multiple site-wide templates for one website. The idea is to separate the core contents of a web page from the graphical elements making up the page header and footer. Our goal is to non-intrusively allow both programmers and graphics designers to work mostly independently, decreasing development time while increasing the reliability and easing maintenance of the templates. SWTM accomplishes most of these goals through a simple programmer's API, an object-based approach to building templates, and a stored repository of all objects previously created. Thus, even when the separation of tasks between programmer and graphics designer is not possible, the programmer need only solve each problem once, allowing the graphics designer to reuse initial work in future templates.by Michael Bryzek.M.Eng

Webpage design optimization using genetic algorithm driven CSS

In the rapid emergence of globalization, e-commerce, and internet accessibility in remote parts of the world, ongoing feedback and participation from site visitors are essential for attaining clear and effective communication on a web site. This thesis presents a computational experiment for optimizing design of a webpage in an evolutionary manner. Webpage personalization is viewed as a configuration problem whose goal is to determine the optimal presentation of a webpage while taking into account the preference of the web author (designer), layout constraints (web design/editing language: HTML, CSS), and viewer interaction with the browser. The study proposes use of genetic algorithm-driven Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to assist the process of webpage design optimization. This method will engage visitors to remotely modify and enhance the style (type, layout and color) of web site to fit their aesthetic and functional representation of well-received design. The preference feedback from user will be stored in an application server for automated evolutionary selection process and reinitialized for the next generation of users. Through the experimentation of web prototype and user evaluation test, the implementation of this method is examined and the derived design solutions are analyzed based on web aesthetics, standards, and accessibility

Towards a multimedia formatting vocabulary

Time-based, media-centric Web presentations can be described declaratively in the XML world through the development of languages such as SMIL. It is difficult, however, to fully integrate them in a complete document transformation processing chain. In order to achieve the desired processing of data-driven, time-based, media-centric presentations, the text-flow based formatting vocabularies used by style languages such as XSL, CSS and DSSSL need to be extended. The paper presents a selection of use cases which are used to derive a list of requirements for a multimedia style and transformation formatting vocabulary. The boundaries of applicability of existing text-based formatting models for media-centric transformations are analyzed. The paper then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a fully-fledged time-based multimedia formatting model. Finally, the discussion is illustrated by describing the key properties of the example multimedia formatting vocabulary currently implemented in the back-end of our Cuypers multimedia transformation engine