Re: Developer's Tools (was Re: Archives and Web Site)

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> 
> I've been trying to figure out just what HyperStudio does that
> makes it special.  Certainly the hypertext notion of linking and
> whatnot is good, but the web can do that.  And if you do it on the
> web, you are working on a peer level with the rest of the world
> instead of with a specially educationally-oriented product like
> HyperStudio.
> 
> Now, HyperStudio does have a nice WYSIWYG interface, semi-
> dynamic content, a layout-oriented (vs. structural) design, all
> packaged in a single file.
> 
> But the WYSIWYG for HTML is certainly possible.
> 
Actually, I disagree with you there.  WYSIWYG is not possible with HTML,
since HTML is a (primitive) semantic markup language rather than a
layout language.  All of the attempts I've seen to force a specific view
of the content on the users via HTML break rather badly in one or
another context.  And most attempts to use HTML as a
pseudo-page-layout-language are unintelligible in Lynx or to people
using anything other than Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer. 
Many visually impaired people use Lynx with screen reader software to
access the Web.

> The dynamic things you can do with HyperStudio aren't all that
> impressive.
> 
> I think the web is a better replacement for HyperStudio than Visual
> Tcl would probably be (though I haven't looked at vtcl).  I think
> content, not behavior, is at the core of what people try to do with
> HyperStudio.  A programming environment (like vtcl) is suited well
> to complicated behavior, but the web is better suited to content --
> it's platform-neutral (more or less -- I assume anything people
> would make under Linux would be platform-neutral), easily
> distributed (its most powerful benefit), and ubiquitous (per my
> previous arguments against KidPrograms).
> 
I don't have any problem with this sort of tool using HTML as a data
format, although I'm afraid it may not give the precision of placement
most authors are looking fore while remaining platform-neutral.  I
suggested Tcl/Tk because it's ubiquitous on Linux systems and is
available for Macs, Windows, and probably almost every other system
made.  Still, the details of it all are less important to me than that
an easy-to-use authoring tool for non-programmer educators be made
available.

-- 
Doug Loss                 A life spent making mistakes is not only
Data Network Coordinator  more honorable, but more useful than a
Bloomsburg University     life spent doing nothing.
dloss@bloomu.edu                G. B. Shaw