Hi Martin, yeah I thought you would get a kick out of that one! :) It's pretty funny how the UI actually functions when that rotation is going on if you can manage to actually click on things.

> i expected the whole display to rotate by steps of 45 degrees.

The sort of top level layout is basically a custom layout mechanism, that level is not handled by HTML, mostly because the viewport 3D display area is pretty much a separate thing from the GUI / buttons type area.

The top level layout handles a kind of generic "panel", and there can be ViewPanel that hold the viewports, and UIPanels that hold HTML content. Things like dialogs and flyout menus just have one UI panel in them.

This structure actually ended up helping quite a bit when I did the big transition from IE to WebKit - MoI v3 (and v2.52) use a completely different HTML engine for the UI panels than MoI v1 and v2.0.

- Michael

It would be a niffty trick to pull on someone when that have had a little to much beer/wine etc.

It's all clever stuff, I got about as far as playing with Dynamic HTML many years back (10 or so) but decided web design was not for me, trying to maintain client sites and still finding time to design new ones was getting too much.

Martin Spencer-Ford

Hi Martin, yeah definitely Dynamic HTML has a whole lot of its own quirks, I invested a lot of time back about that same time period before getting comfortable with it. It tends to be particularly good in the area of handling text though, with a lot of features involving text layout, word wrapping, and sizing things to fit child content. These are the reasons why I've persisted in using it for application UI for quite a long time now. And it's also the closest thing that exists to a global cross-platform "known by many" type of UI. Also it's had scripting built into it for quite a long time and the ability to bundle script code along with the UI in one package is very flexible.

- Michael

Yeah, I could see the potential for it, but flash and css came along and DHTML seemed to drop from flavour of the month to the poor mans tool. But yes it was good for animating text blocks and adding some cool mouse over effects, i miss animation at times, but I am happy to tinker with my 3D hobby. I used to do programming too, but then .net came along and i lost the whole logic and struggled so that got abandoned too. But that was done purely as fun and for my own system checking tools. Who knows, one day I might go back to it.

Martin Spencer-Ford