[olpc-software] AbiWord, HIG

[Alan Kay]

Hi --

At 10:11 AM 3/15/2006, Alan Cox wrote:
>On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 09:31:32AM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> > really good about (say) wikipedia is that it works if you have a browser.
> > What's bad is that browsers were not furnished with enough dynamic 
> graphics
> > programmability so we can't go much beyond the wikipedia.
>
>This isn't actually true for a modern browser, and becomes incredibly untrue
>with the inclusion of SVG. Things like google maps are really only scratching
>the surface of what can be done with javascript today. We don't yet have
>SVG in all the browsers but its coming,

by when? in time for HDLT?

>  we do have all the bitmap graphics
>and javascript functionality plus DOM to manipulate the underlying document.
>Most of it is now even standardised so you can choose to write portable code.
>
>Bit perfect - no, functional yes. You could reimplement hypercard with it, but
>firstly you'd have to find a reason 8)

I wouldn't reimplement HC, but children (and other end-users) do need to 
have a WYSIWYG scriptable media authoring environment that works through a 
browser in a wiki-like manner. I mentioned HC because it predated the web 
and would have made an excellent initial web page authoring and consumption 
environment.

Cheers,

Alan



>Alan