Re: Self Mosaic home page

[jecel@lsi.usp.br (Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr.)]

> Thanks mostly to Bay-Wie Chang, Self now has a Mosaic home page,
> 
>     http://self.stanford.edu
> 
> All of our material continues to be available via ftp, but the Mosaic
> interface is definitively friendlier (e.g., it has an online
> bibliography and paper abstracts).

I just got a chance to use xMosaic and the first thing I tried was
the above address. Wow! It really is much better than FTPing. I
found the paper on animation in the UI that I had overlooked
before. The Self logo is really great. Like Self itself :-), it
is simple but effective.

One reason why I was so interested in looking at Mosaic is that I
am thinking about something like html for documentation. As I see
it ( I think I've said this before... ), there are three levels
of documentation that are needed:

    - code level. The current source comments are probably
                  enough ( for example, x: x + 1 "increment x" )

    - object level. This would tell you how to use the object in
                  programs, what it does, etc. We now have annotations,
                  but they could be nicer than simple strings.

    - application level. This would help you use an "application"
                  consisting of many objects. A "guru" section
                  might also explain the structure of the program.

It is this last level that I am thinking about, but the second
level could also be "linked" in. It would be neat to see the
author's photo or other useless stuff when browsing through
some objects. And the object level docs might be linked together
in catalogs.

Any comments?

- Jecel