A new outliner.

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 30

Posted by noSPAM
1999-08-08 08:53:32

I envision a new product that merges the capabilities of several existing products…

MORE (an outline processor),
HyperHIT (embeddable, hierarchical & relational [H&R]DBMSs),
SpreadBase (a 2D outline processor [hierarchical tables]), and
Frontier (a scripting engine [& perhaps more?]).

This new product would have an abstract storage model that could be replaced [e.g., Filesystem for HDBMS & SQL for RDBMS], a MORE-like user interface for 1D (MORE) and 2D (SpreadBase) hierarchical outlines, and a scriptable interface for automation and integration with other applications.

I envision the MORE-like interface to display and manipulate the contents of the HDBMS. Within the ‘comments’ sections of the outline would be documents with rulers that apply at the paragraph level. Tables would contain data stored in the RDBMS. Rows and columns in tables could be collapsed into hierarchies, and formulae could be used to customize the display of data within (meta-)cells. All of this could support automation through an open scripting interface, using a scripting language of choice (e.g.s, Perl, VBscript, JavaScript, Frontier & etc.)

Perhaps an XCMD/XFCN/XOBJ type of thing could be included as well so that new datatypes could be supported without having to develop a new release to enhance functionality, but those that make sense could be incorporated into future product releases.

I look forward to hearing opinions on this idea.

Kurt

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