New subject: Am I asking wrong? (It was Re: Re: Iceberg metaphor for writing/dataviz or How to avoid revisiting nodes in a tree for getting proper updating of browsers?)

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

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-gtins...
[2] 
http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/creating-custom-browsers-out-of-ins...

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).

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Iceberg metaphor for writing/dataviz or How to avoid revisiting nodes in a tree for getting proper updating of browsers?