Re: Self Mosaic home page

[David.Ungar@Eng.Sun.COM (David Ungar)]

Congrats, Bay!

Jecel, interesting thoughts!
I am fascinated by the paradigm of duality or even multi-ality.
I think that humans perceive a given phenomenon in many ways, like those
figure-ground reversal illusions, and that this is very important.
So, we look at some Self program, and almost-simultaneously see it as
a collection of objects, a set of slots, a group of invarients maintained,
etc, etc.
I'm not sure that "levels" is the best metaphor, because some of the different
views overlap or intersect.
But anything that lets you look at the same thing in different ways fits in
with this
model.

At  5:40 PM 4/5/94 -0500, Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
>> 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

-- Dave