A Multiple-Representation Paradigm for Document Development
Abstract
Powerful personal workstations with high-resolution displays, pointing devices, and windowing environments have created many new possibilities in presenting information, accessing data, and efficient computing in general. In the context of document preparation, this workstation-based technology has made it possible for the user to directly manipulate a document in its final form. The central idea is that a document is immediately reprocessed as it is edited; no syntactic constructs are explicitly used to express the desired operations. This so-called direct manipulation approach differs substantially from the traditional source language model, in which document semantics (structures and appearances) are specified with interspersed markup commands. In the source language model, a document is first prepared with a text editor, its formatting and other related processors are then executed, usually in batch mode, and the result is obtained. A complete document development process involves a number of subtasks ranging from authoring, reading, filing, to printing. There are certain aspects of document development that are best-suited to a source-language approach while others are easier to deal with using direct-manipulation techniques. A hybrid paradigm combining the best of both approaches seems most desirable. In such a hybrid system, a document has at least two representations: a source representation with embedded commands that yields flexible high-level abstractions, and a target representation displaying an object's final appearance that gives precise placement and orientation in response to direct manipulation. Simultaneously maintaining more than one user-manipulable representation of the same document is not an easy task. In particular, the historically batch-oriented processors that correspond to source-to-target transformations would have to be made incremental. Furthermore, there must be a systematic way of mapping changes from the target representation back.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 05, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA619783
Entities
People
- Pehong Chen
Organizations
- University of California, Berkeley