Extending a Reactive Expression Language with Data Update Actions for End-User Application Authoring
Author(s)
Verou, Lea; Alrashed, Tarfah; Karger, David R
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Mavo is a small extension to the HTML language that empowers non-programmers to create simple web applications. Authors can mark up any normal HTML document with attributes that specify data elements that Mavo makes editable and persists. But while applications authored with Mavo allow users to edit individual data items, they do not offer any programmatic data actions that can act in customizable ways on large collections of data simultaneously or that modify data according to a computation. We explore an extension to the Mavo language that enables non-programmers to author these richer data update actions. We show that it lets authors create a more powerful set of applications than they could previously, while adding little additional complexity to the authoring process. Through user evaluations, we assess how closely our data update syntax matches how novice authors would instinctively express such actions, and how well they are able to use the syntax we provided.
Date issued
2018-10Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Verou, Lea et al. "Extending a Reactive Expression Language with Data Update Actions for End-User Application Authoring." Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 2018, Berlin, Germany, Association for Computing Machinery, October 2018. © 2018 The Authors
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
9781450359481