to two-pane to one-pane, that is the question

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2732

Posted by sub
2005-02-14 13:54:59

[Stephen D.: What are the two-pane benfits? Why should anyone prefer two panes? I’m not sure they should.]

Well, for one, I use two-pane outliners for very diverse information items that I want to keep in context; i.e. project contacts, financial info, terms of reference, related background URLs etc. It makes no sense in mixing all that in a single page view.

[Stephen D.: Maybe the two-pane format merely interferes _less_ in a database, and it seems easier to implement. Alex might be able to comment on whether that speculation about ease of implemention is correct.]

I think a two-pane approach is more likely to require a database oriented infrastructure in order to ensure the robustness you’ve discussed elsewhere.

Let’s take Word as an example of a one-pane outliner; it is a word processor where content is stored in a linear form. Hierarchy is not inherent in the structure; rather, levels are text attributes in the same way that format information is. This explains how one can actually have “missing levels”, i.e. have a level 3 item directly subsidiary to a level 1 item.

A two-pane outliner such as UltraRecall, on the other hand, _should_ treat items as separate entities, referencing them through some kind of unique identifier so that they can be related and retrieved through keywords, hierarchical levels, metadata or whatever one chooses to organise them under.

Therefore, a classic one-pane outliner might be simpler to build as it’s focused merely around the display interface. I’d guess that the only reason there are no more Windows one-pane outliners around is that as products they’d be hard to diversify from word processors and compete with heavyweights like Word.

I also suspect that this strict differentiation between the two development approaches is rather ideal and that UltraRecall, Idea!, ndxCards and InfoHandler are some of the few that have actually gone into the trouble of creating a robust database infrastructure. In fact, this would explain the widespread lack of undo in the outline pane.

alx

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