On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 07:09:27PM +0100, Hannes Hirzel wrote:

[snip]

> > > >with BookMorphs and experimenting with \"active essays\" in Squeak. 
> 
> I wonder why not more people are writing active essays. All the tools
> seem to be there in Squeak. Why we not use this possibility? 
> Because we are used nowadays to the HTML paradigm? 
> Well I'v to admit that looking at the internet most people do not
> understand this new medium. Most of the items in the net are 
> infos like 'Yes I'm here, my name is so and so, here's my address
> and I like this lists of lists'. Real content is often missing 
> and hard to find. An additional problem is as that reuse is difficult.
> (tradition in science - copyright issues)

I've only just started playing with BookMorphs and the like (I know,
I'm WAYY behind the rest of the class :) and I really enjoy the whole
active essay concept.  The only problem I ran into was that I couldn't 
figure out how to save my BookMorph when I was done. :)  (well, I could
save it as a Morph from the debug menu, but not in any other way...I 
couldn't see any obvious way to give it a file:// URL)

However, I wonder if we could create a sort of on-line BookMorph library
of sorts...sort of the Squeak answer to UNIX 'man pages'.  I was in
the process of writing up some documentation for code I was writing (in LaTeX)
and it just sort of struck me...why not do it all in a Book?

I suppose this is done in some ways with the published projects on the
Super Swiki.

> 
> 
> A practical consideration
> -------------------------
> Comparing for example Adobe Acrobats size it seems to
> be feasable to distribute a Squeak active essay together with a
> considerable rest of the Squeak image along with different VMs.
> With the modules now in place it is straightforward to get an new
> image down to 10MB (of course 5 MB would be better). 
> Bob's Superswiki has about 200 projects. Taking  the really different
> ones with some content there are about 20. What is people helding back.
> Actually now we just could _write_ Active Essays. 
> 
> 

[snip]
> 
> Yes, indeed!
> 
> Encyclopedic knowledge
> ----------------------
> Are you aware of www.wikipedia.com? An intersting tele-cooperative
> open source authoring projects which uses tool-wise rather traditional
> techniques but is in IMO an interesting experiment.

No, I had not heard of that...I will take a look! 

> 
> In our Squeak context we could think of 'InfoObjects' - objects like
> encyclopedia entries which could render themselves in different
> perspectives. We could have browsers for them and have them render
> themselves in various ways.
> 
> 
> This is an interesting discussion. Keep it going! And do not forget
> to write more persistent notes as well on the Swiki
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/.

I think the whole concept of how text can be represented and composed 
can reach a whole new dimension in a digital medium.

I know I find the subject fascinating...Text has evolved over thousands
of years...from pictograms, to stone tablets, to Gutenberg, to the 
typewriter.  Now with computers, perhaps we can reach the next stage
of it all (and really, we haven't yet...we're still simulating paper
for the most part).


> 
> Referencing Swiki pages - we can edit easily - helps to contextualize
> the discussion here.
> 
> Finally - why not write a dynamic essay like
> Andreas Raab did on Morph layout or Ted Kaehler on some statistics
> oriented considerations about evolution. (Although the evolution example
> is relatively traditional - a set of HTML-pages together with some
> JavaScript would have done the job as well while giving at the same
> time better hypertext linking - OK I admit authoring was perhaps faster.)
> 
> 
> 
> Hannes Hirzel
> 
> 

I'm still considering transferring my documentation over from LaTeX to
a BookMorph.  Perhaps I will do that anyway, just for the learning
exercise. :)