::scr Document Centric Interfaces

[Paul Mison]

On 01/10/2001 at 11:54 +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:

>Wouldn't it be better to work on a document using tools instead. Like
>you do
>in real life - you get a peice of paper and then you write stuff with
>a biro.
>To draw a diagram you take out your ruler and compass and draw the
>diagram.
>Then you fold it up and stick it in an envelope and send it somewhere.

[... snipped]

>Various other OSs have tried to do this - command line *nix sort of
>does the
>same thing with pipes and streams but that can only really act on
>text, only
>works on a pipe line and can't have human input.
>
>Openbook and OLE are similar-ish but really don't go far enough - plus
>they're
>*still* application centric not document centric.

OpenDoc (not Openbook) was getting quite far along with this before its
plug got pulled. And that, perhaps, is a telling statement: this was a
project that was already at a fairly usable state (there was an entire
Net application suite- Cyberdog- and a text editor portion written, and
they were fairly documentcentric) yet still it failed. Why?

Possibly the answer is that people have now learnt how to work in an
application centric world- programmers as well as users. Possibly the
overhead of writing a OpenDoc component as well as a full application
put off programmers. Users saw no point in learning Cyberdog when
Netscape was striding away in terms of functionalilty, despite the
latter being available for far more platforms.

Of course, this was an Apple project, so politics is bound to have
played some part in it.

There are already soltions to the problem of mixed-media documents. If
you need to edit a graphic in Photoshop then put it into a Word
document, well, that's what cut and paste is for. I'd contend that's
(for anything over moderatly competent users, anyway) a well understood
and robust mechanism. Sure, it's not as elegant, but it works Well
Enough- see Unix, C, Windows, etc.

There are other hacks to achieve similar things. To commit the scr
cardinal sin of focussing on an example, you mention spell checkers;
well, on Mac OS the Word spell checker *is* available to other
applications, and OS X has services, one of which will no doubt be a
spellchecker. Yes, these are kludges compared to a full DC system, but
on the other hand, you chose that as an example exactly because that's
one of the main tools you're worried about.

Hmm, on reflection, the Services concept (which is a NeXT feature- it
tells applications that 'if you're doing something to text, here's how
I can affect it', hence the spellchecker example) might be a back door
into a more document centric system. It's not the same as building one
from the ground up- but doesn't BeOS show us the dangers of trying that
approach these days?

So in summary, nice idea, but it'll probably never happen.

--
:: paul
:: get chased by a giant tortoise