Hi all,
I'm advancing at making my interactive notebook for open/garage/citizen research & science in Moose called Grafoscopio[0]. This are baby steps towards an alternate approach to what Andrei, Jan and Doru are trying [1][2] for documentation, that begins with a document tree inside the image and "projects" the files (markdown by traversing the tagged tree and then latex and html, via pandoc and pdf via pdftex/luatex). In this way you can have a complete interactive document (book size) inside the image, stored/shared/versioned in the lightweight STON with arbitrary levels of deepness and only think about files when you are exporting to pdf or intermediate formats. Also I think that this solution is easier to run on Windows that Pillar Book Skeleton.
[0] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Grafoscopio [1] http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/writing-pillar-books-with-the-gtinspec... [2] http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/creating-custom-browsers-out-of-inspec...
Markdown (pandoc's variant) express only the surface of the writing, while deeper structure is stored in the image and STON. I call this the "iceberg metaphor" for writing and data visualization, so instead of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) of common word processors you have WYSIOTSOWYH (What You See Is Only The Surface Of What You Have) which is what happens with most of the time and the common word processing and file oriented metaphors can capture/express. New metaphors for writing are needed if we want to bootstrap more open/inclusive ways to do science and research, coming not only from academia but also from non canonical places like citizens and garages, maker/hacker spaces.
Here is a small video of how interface looks today, which allow me to introduce some practical questions on how to deliver this vision:
https://archive.org/details/grafoscopio-tags-alpha1.mp4
As you can see, I can tag a node as code (código) and the node view and behaviour gets updated after revisiting the node, providing auto-completion and syntax highlighting, so:
1. There is any way to get the node view/behaviour updated instantly without the need to revisit the node?
2. When I press the accept icon I don't get the code executed, even if I selected all previously. There is any way to get the code executed?
3. My idea in the future is to make the node view of the tree at the right side a complete playground instead of a workspace, with their emergent lateral panels when an object is selected. There is any way to embed a playground in a browser pane or any plan to implement this feature?
4. At the very end of the video you see the trace of an error that is raised when I select and empty part of the tree. This is the most annoying behaviour and can create lost of information if you have write a node and not saved the tree just before clicking and empty tree space. I imagine that this can be solved with a "when:" message that can be used to tell the browser only to show something in the right if there is something selected at the left. I will try to debug this, but any pointer in the right direction would be appreciated.
It has been a pleasure to work with Pharo and Moose for this project. Is a very empowering platform to express ideas about how interactive documentation could be done, among other things and the community is welcoming and awesome!
Thanks,
Offray
ps: attached is the ston file for the document used in the video).