On 10/15/10 11:52 AM, John Zabroski wrote:
If you want great Design Principles for the Web, read (a) M.A. Padlipsky's
book The Elements of Networking Style [2] (b) Radia Perlman's book
Interconnections [3] (c) Roy Fielding's Ph.d. Thesis [4]
While not exactly about the web, I just saw this video yesterday (video link
is the "View Webinar" button to the right):
"Less is More: Redefining the “I” of the IDE (W-JAX Keynote)"
http://live.eclipse.org/node/676
"Not long ago the notion of a tool that hides more of the program than it
shows sounded crazy. To some it probably still does. But as Mylyn continues
its rapid adoption, hundreds of thousands of developers are already part of
the next big step in the evolution of the IDE. Tasks are more important than
files, focus is more important than features, and an explicit context is the
biggest productivity boost since code completion. This talk discusses how
Java, OSGi, Eclipse, Mylyn, and a combination of open source frameworks and
commercial extensions like Tasktop have enabled this transformation. It then
reviews lessons learned for the next generation of tool innovations, and
looks ahead at how we are redefining the “I” of the IDE."
But, the funny thing about that video is that it is, essentially about how
the Eclipse and Java communities have reinvented the Smalltalk-80 work
environment without admitting it or even recognizing it. :-)
Even "tasks" were represented in Smalltalk in the 1980s and 1990s as
"projects" able to enter worlds of windows (and to a lesser extent,
workspaces as a manual collection of related evaluable commands).
I have to admit things now are "bigger" and "better" in various ways
(including security sandboxing, the spread of these ideas to cheap hardware,
and what Mylyn does at the desktop level with the TaskTop extensions), so I
don't want to take that away from recent innovations or the presenter's
ongoing work. But it is all so surreal to someone who has been using
computers for about 30 years and knows about Smalltalk. :-)
By the way, on what Tim Berners-Lee may miss about network design?
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces" by Manuel De Landa
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains
and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly
turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and
hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory
alone but demand concrete experimentation."
So, that interweaves with an idea like a principle of least power. Still, I
think Tim Berners-Lee makes a lot of good points. But how design patterns
combine in practice is a complex issue. :-) Manuel De Landa's point there is
so insightful though, because it says, sometimes, yes, there is some value
to a hierarchies or a standardizations, but that value interacts with the
value of meshworks in potentially unexpected ways that require experiment to
work through.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
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