selfdisplay

Selfdisplay is a term used in software engineering to describe a design principle in which a software component is responsible for rendering or presenting its own data or state to users or other components. The emphasis is on encapsulating presentation logic within the component.

In practice, a selfdisplayable component implements a standard interface or protocol that exposes a method such as display() or describe(). This method returns a human-readable representation and may also provide a machine-readable form (for example JSON) for debugging or interoperability. Some frameworks formalize self-display through a protocol that components adopt, enabling generic renderers to obtain a depiction without knowing internal structure.

Applications include user interface widgets that render themselves, reporting tools that generate summaries, and debugging utilities that emit self-describing logs. Self-display can also support accessibility by providing descriptive text through the component's own display method.

Advantages include consistent representation, encapsulation of presentation logic, and easier theming or customization across platforms. It can simplify testing by centralizing how a component presents its state.

Challenges include potential performance overhead, tighter coupling between data and presentation, and the risk of exposing sensitive internal state. In practice, many systems balance self-display with separate presentation layers to avoid leaking implementation details.

Relation to other concepts: related to toString or __repr__ in programming languages, and to models like MVVM; it complements the idea of self-describing data.

See also: toString, __repr__, self-describing data, data serialization.