Most software could be improved by a _FO&D_ button to cick
L
On Fri, June 8, 2012 18:12, Dominic Fox wrote:
> Just to bore on a bit:
>
>
> By "grammar of interaction" I mean the ways you do things with a mouse
> and keyboard: pointing and clicking, highlighting regions of text, dragging
> and dropping. You see the changes happening as you make them; there's a
> tight feedback loop between acting and having something to react to. This
> is thought to make human beings happier and more productive, and up to a
> point it does.
>
> By "grammar of definition" I mean the way the content and layout of a
> document is specified in some symbolic language. The symbolic language
> determines in the last instance what the document is going to look like;
> everything you do when interacting with the graphical representation of
> the document is modifying its symbolic representation in some way.
>
> The experience everyone has when using MSWord is that there is
> something in the symbolic representation of the document - the computer has
> got something into its head about what you want to see - that isn't
> immediately visible or tractable through the user interface. You can't see
> the thing that's mucking up your layout, you can't select it or delete it
> or do anything to it, and it looks like the only way to make it go away is
> to delete everything in the surrounding area and hope for the best. This
> is known to make human beings crabby and superstitious, and to play a
> significant role in inculcating the feelings of learned helplessness with
> which "non-techies" approach even their most amiable and well-loved
> computing devices.
>
> With a bit of experience, you get to know the most common of these
> glitches, and the quickest ways to resolve them. But it still feels like a
> bit of a black art. You're not dealing with the document at its most
> fundamental level of representation; you're stage-whispering instructions
> through a thick, velvety curtain. The same curtain that felt so plush and
> inviting when you first brushed up against it...
>
> I don't want to fiddle directly with the program's internal data
> structures; that would be silly. But I would like to work with a
> representation of those data structures that is complete, concise, and
> readable/editable by both human beings and machines. And that's what a
> markup language is: simply the cleanest, clearest, most tractable and
> predictable way of controlling what the computer's going to put on the
> screen or send to the printer.
>
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Lawrence Upton
Visiting Fellow, Music Dept,
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
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