Re: Is InfoHandler an outliner (was Re: An Addi....)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2513

Posted by stephenz
2005-01-11 16:03:25

> It sounds as though the weakness of Zoot is in providing an overview of the data.

You are correct that Zoot isn’t well suited for visually showing hierarchies of data, though it is able to do so through folders and sub-folders… it is just fairly clumsy at it. Items in themselves can’t have sub-items, they can only reside (actually, appear to reside is more accurate) within a folder or folders. This feature used to bother me, but now I like it. Maybe that’s another reason I see a difference between a composition outliner and a data outline. In the composition outliner I’d like to see all those connections and allow any item to have a sub item, but in my data manager, I don’t feel that need. I certainly am not suggesting this should be a universal attitude, however.

> But if you understand the structure of your data, it [Zoot] allows you to develop hierarchical structures on the fly to suit your needs. Is that in the right ball park?

Yes, I think that says it well. Zoot allows you to build rules for any single folder to bring in data that has been categorized any number of ways: other folder assignments, categories, strings of text, delimited fields, and any combination of these. So, I believe it provides a way to get to the same result as the recursive rules you are refering to… heck, maybe these are recursive rules.

Steve Z.

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