while exploring dublin core for a final project, i came upon the elegantly simple nc echo dublin core metadata template.

in dublin core, every metadata element (like “creator” or “description”) can be used zero, one, or many times to describe a resource. eli naeher designed the template above using javascript and DOM so that any end user could modify the template itself in the browser. which makes dom especially important for accessing and modifying the elements in web user-interfaces.

in web database applications (such as my masters project), there are many places where an information object (such as an expense) needs to be described in terms of one or more instances of another class of information objects (such as activities). the problem from a UI design perspective is that there may be no maximum number of objects allowed to describe an object.

so using some modifications on the code from nc echo, I created the following functional UI mock-up, essentially a structured spreadsheet that allows dynamically growing or shrinking sets of select and text fields for reviewing and editing the many-to-many relationships between objects.

update: i’ve added an operational version below. here’s the code.