[IxDA Discuss] Details of a Tree Widget

[Alan Wexelblat]

On 4/4/07, pauric <radiorental at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems from your description that only one label-content association can
> be displayed at a time.  That would lead me to expect that if I collapsed a
> node, I also collapsed/hid the content relating to that node. Modal.
>
> My answer to your question:  The -/+ actions are associated with their
> respective nodes. The content for A should be highlighted.

I would agree with pauric because I feel that the opportunities for
confusion are too great otherwise.  I believe that the design pattern
of tree-left/detail-right (or whatever it's properly called) implies a
strong association between the visual selected state of the tree and
the content display on the right.  To decouple them would mean that
people had no visual cues as to what content was on the detail pane,
or worse they'd have to look to cues other than the tree's visible
state.

I confess that I have not tested any of this, so I'm purely going by
my instinct and reasoning from first principles.

--Alan