Tim Bates wrote:
> On the HyperCard list when discussing QTML, many people noted that what
> we want is not HyperCard, but HyperTalk, the ability to speak English
> about objects.
>
> Of course the card model is enticing, but equally it is restrictive. In
> the web age, I wonder if the web browser is not a better metaphor than
> the rolodex?
I've been thinking a lot about that lately.
One day I asked myself, "Why aren't ALL my word processing documents
*HyperCard* documents, instead of BBEdit or WordPerfect documents?
Why do I reach for those other programs to create text documents?
Wouldn't it be great if the related documents on my hard drive
could be hypertext-linked internally to each other, just like Web pages,
but were completely and easily scriptable in HyperTalk instead of
that yucky HTML and Java?"
Suppose the first window you saw every time you opened HyperCard was
a "portrait" window, the shape and size of a piece of paper, instead
of a 512 x 342 landscape one. Seems to me it would then be a LOT
more obvious that HyperCard could be HyperDocument or HyperBook.
THAT would broaden its appeal. People like and use paper and books
a lot more than stacks of index cards. And the Web has shown us that
linked documents can be a lot more useful than passive text.
And what about these new "e-books" that are coming out now, where you
can download the text of any book into them and read it page-by-page
electronically? They're just HyperCard as hardware.
So to modify what Tim suggests a little bit, I'd say a better metaphor
than a stack of cards would be simply a set of pages. They could be
a set of web pages or pages of an ordinary document. That broadens the
scope -- and appeal -- of HyperCard to "HyperCard as a Web page tool"
and "HyperCard as a personal hyper-document tool". It also
de-emphasizes "HyperCard as a programming tool", but would allow users
to ease into scripting when they're ready to -- and enjoy it.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this idea. Maybe as Tim suggests,
one possible option for such an "OpenBook" would be to have it
generate some kind of "Web site standalone", if you wanted to put
the pages on the Web, or otherwise have it create the usual kind of
hyperdocument that HyperCard stacks are now.
We could even do better than books. Right now in HyperCard (and in
most books), all the cards in a stack (pages) must be the same size
and shape. Suppose that restriction were removed, so each "page"
could be ANY size and shape.
Then instead of scripting "show this dialog box" and testing a result
when the user presses OK or Cancel, etc., you could simply say
"go to card X" -- a card which happens to BE that dialog box, even
the right shape and size. Then the user would interact with it
like any other card, and it would be scripted like any other card,
without worrying about special DLOG resources and all the rest.
Wouldn't that be simple and flexible? And as you flipped through
the pages of a "book", some pages could be portrait and some could
be landscape, as needed. Has that been done yet? Is it worth doing?
-- Tony
