Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What writing electronically should/could be like

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/4/1999; 10:27:38 PM
Topic:Microsoft, Intel losing ground?
Msg #:10591 (In response to 10590)
Prev/Next:10590 / 10592

For starters remove the notion of files, disks, printing and viewing. Just write it and its there. No more "Save", "Save as", "print", "publish", "typeset" etc etc buttons.

Disagree totally.

What matters is what the braincells are programmed to do.

I am using this kind of an editing system now. I can't tell you how much smoother it got when I mapped Control-S onto what it should do when I'm editing a doc that lives on the net. The File menu must work exactly as it does now. I'm 100 percent sure of that. It's almost a bet-the-company thing.

Next remove the notion of local versus remote. I'm just writing and the text appears on a web page, no matter where it is served from. Who cares where its served from? The viewer doesn't so why should the person publishing the text?

I kind of agree with this. If you want it to really work, there must be no concept of local. If you do it that way, it really is easy to use.

Finally, remove the notion of pages. Everything is linked and can be independently referred to. Text just flows from one paragraph and idea to the next, according to how the viewer wants to traverse this collection.

Oy! No way Jose!! We have this wonderful thing that everyone understands called a web page. Then we have a collection of web pages and everyone knows that that is a web site. These are very valuable concepts, and they are quite well understood. Don't throw the baby out just yet.

I've written up my ideas on this:

http://davenet.userland.com/1999/05/24/editThisPage

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