"Roger Vossler" <rvossler at qwest.net>  wrote...
>As far as I can tell, Dan Ingalls wants to "distribute active
>Squeak content as projects on the Internet" which leads to
>"modularity of projects" which in turn leads to a "component
>architecture" for Squeak. Correct?

Yes, that's pretty close -- and other people have other goals, too.

<...self-admitted rant mostly elided...>
>So, why on earth would I want to modularize a book? How does
>one modularize "Gone With The Wind", the Bible, "Lord Of The Rings"
>or the Iliad? Why would somebody want to do so? How would one do
>it even if they could?

That's not what we're talking about.  We don't want to cramp the style of the content at all.  But you can bring "Gone with the Wind" home from the library, read it, return it, and there aren't pieces of it left around your house.  That's not necessarily the case with Squeak content right now.  We just want to make sure that if you browse some active Squeak content, and then go on to something else, that your system doesn't gradually fill up with garbage, or run into conflicts between simultaneously loaded material.

There's more, too, having to do with whether a given piece of Squeak content will run in a given system, and if it may require some optional facilities.  This doesn't arise in the case of books which are complete, except for, eg, the language and printed encoding that you are assumed to have mastered.  The analogous solution would be to ship all content with Squeak, but right now that looks costly in download time and disk space.  Moreover, that kind of modularity by insulation can be a barrier to some of the possible synergy we hope to achieve by embedding the content in an active medium.

	- Dan