Just a little Tunes-pages feedback... (fwd)

[William Tanksley]

On Thu, 21 Aug 1997, Fare Rideau wrote:

> > While I was browsing back and forth I thought it might be nice to
> > include -> <- arrows or something to go to the next/previoux 'logical'
> > page... Just a thought...

> Yeah, so did I. Only,

Agreed...

> * depending on ones' point of view and background,
>  the "logical" sequence changes
> * "logical" reading might involve finer grain than page grain
> * the pages are not finished, the world changes, and there is no definite
>  logical sequencing of pages that wouldn't change.
> * I'm currently doing the pages manually in HTML, which provides
>  no automatic way to consistently put such arrows in files
> * my primary concern these days would be to have some minimal code base.

And again, agreed, on all points.

> As a conclusion, what would be needed is that the pages be written
> no more in raw HTML, but with a tool that
> * manages multiple documents, subdocuments, "projects", subprojects, etc
> * consistently manages redundancy in those documents,
>  by providing multiple (arbitrary many and different) views on them,
>  and always consistently update other parts of the documents
>  to maintain user-defined invariants.
> * allows users to annotate pages with their interest, and what is a
>  "logical" order for them, and reuse info to infer potential logical
>  order for similarly-minded people [See GroupLens and Pattie Maes' stuff]

> That's all the kind of things that I expect from what I call "MetaText",
> as opposed to mere "HyperText". Not a static published structure
> that one browses, but a dynamic structure that everyone builds,
> that adapts to people, that truely interacts with them.
> And there is no such thing currently, so that the only
> implementation of MetaText will be... Tunes.

Um... Disagree.  Embedded Perl would do exactly this; it's here now.  Even
if it weren't, we could still use SGML.

BTW, were you unable to find the Abstract State Machines page I mentioned?
I think it belongs in the VM page.

-Billy