> Not many other uses for
> forms make sense for offline web viewing. Other ideas are welcome...
Perhaps local forms...
I've been thinking about the types of electronic books I keep on my
Palm. There seem to be three major categories:
1) Text and image documents, like Plucker's natural fodder. Possibly
linked tarballs of text and/or images, possibly with multiple fonts
and font attributes. DOC files are just a degenerate case of this
form.
2) Tables, like MobileDB "docs". These are two-dimensional
tabulations of items.
3) Forms-fronted. These are what I call books that have a thin
mechanistic veneer in front of them. For example, the Collins
dictionaries sold at http://www.palmtop.nl/palm/products.html. Great
dictionaries, but basically just the text of the paperback version.
What they've done to make it interesting is to put the text in a box
below a write-in line. You write the word you're looking up on the
write-in line, and the text incrementally scrolls to that word in the
display box. They also have a button always visible which both
indicates whether you're looking at the "English-Italian" section or
the "Italian-English" section. Two simple devices that make the book
much easier to use.
It would be interesting if we could come up with a way to support all
three of these forms in Plucker. The "forms-fronted" type would seem
to require some kind of scripting language, but perhaps there's a
simpler declarative way of handling it.
Bill
