New WeeklySqueak Record

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sun Feb 18 16:35:13 UTC 2007


On 18-Feb-07, at 1:29 AM, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

>
> Oh yes, this extension plugin layer looks very interesting. One may  
> expect that resource publishers, for let's say a mathematic  
> teaching material could provide plugin based content to expose  
> interactive mathematic contents (interactive geometry, graphing  
> system, algebraic system, etc.) within the normal text flow. The  
> user experience would be extremely expanded with such interactive  
> books.
We have - but don't currently support properly, to be honest -  
computed nodes that are intended to provide some of this dynamic  
content capability. At the simplest level this would be a way to  
provide page numbering (put a computed node that displays the  
printstring of the system page counter on the page template) or to  
incorporate the current NYSE value etc.
One of the main practical hurdles that has stopped us doing much with  
them is the potential  for runaway compositing work. Imagine someone  
mistakenly making a computednode that displays the millisecond tick  
value every millisecond. Or a random image grabbed from google  
images, with the size changing constantly and causing reformatting of  
many pages as a result. We got a bit confused trying to work this  
part out and left it for later!
I can imagine making a subclass of computednode that wraps some of  
that glorious mathmorph stuff to provide graphing.

There is still a *lot* to do. Handling the structured text turns out  
to be one of the more complicated things I've ever worked on and  
there are still many, many, editing and compositing edge cases to  
sort out.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Fractured Idiom:- VENI, VIDI, VICE - I came, I saw, I partied.





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