...in which I added the What's New button, but in the whole, evolving reconceptualizing taking place over the last half a dozen releases. I'm older and mellower, so this may be be the quietest of the concept papers in this loose leaf eManual. But don't let the excitement pass you by. The very number of releases in a short span of time shows that I'm learning what I c'n do Windows (and Delphi) programming and that I'm learning what can be done in the new, webbed, world.
PocketPad 1.0 was just another of the Notepad replacements contextually. In my mind, though, it was a proper text editor such as those that existed in DOS, Unix, and other "real programming" worlds, before GUI (graphical user interface) which, because of what was being done with it, should have been called ICI ("ice-ee", interactive cartoon interface). The file size limit in PocketPad was still 32K as in notepad. But, you could open as many editors as you wanted within the one frame window. I developed fancy window hopping methods, fast and easy, and "technology" to page bigger files, multiply load them, and manage and reassemble them.
But what I was really replacing was the writing and editing philosophy, the "text handling." The next paper down in the TOC, ewriter.htm, has that whole story as does the farther down and earlier pcketpad.htm. In fact, read the oldest first. But even that was late.
By PocketPad 1.1, I was already seeing the "webs" out there and "distributed" activity (far beyond just "computing"). And I was still in my "replacing" mode. Not just Notepad, but the "word processors." The evil of word processors was vendor lock-in. File formats and expensive file worker apps, even before bloatware became the order of the day.
What I saw "in the webbing," was a free or very nearly free EVERYone's eTypewriter. It would be a duplex or distributed machine. The writing end would be a text editor and the screening and printing end would be a (web) browser. Top notch text editors come with every package of any kind, just about. And top of the line browsers, newest models, were free or under fifty bucks. With a little "well punctuated" writing, good looking copies could be turned out.
Well punctuated? I saw that "tagging" (with HTML tags in particular because unlike RTF tags, anybody could read them and handle them) was punctuating. Read those same early papers in this eManual for details. Anyway, I first put a few helper items on the Edit menu, mainly the <|> and </|> tag frames. Then, I added Keys so that escaped letters could be put in and, of course, the HTML menu. Later, I added in Javascript and Meta menus.
With eWriter, I could set things up to bring in files of any size as well as any number and so could drop the paging tools though I kept batch loading, of course. And I was at home with eWriting. And a "doubled" writing. The manuscript is, essentially, an "engine" copy and what people will see, on screen or paper, an "interface" copy. Some of the later papers in this collection will go into that in growing and changing detail.
Only recently did I clean up my conceptual models. I'd long said that ewriter was an eTypewriter or "a typewriter with a mouse." In the face of word "processors" and text "editors" and "authoring tools," I wanted to keep it all humanly, and humanely, simple. A typewriter with a mouse. A typewriter that comes in two pieces, both ubiquitous and free, ...but a typewriter all the same. So no gaudy toolbars, no sophisticated sets of nested menus, and no proprietary nuthin'!
We think of text as a flow of words, going "single file" as it were. The key item, though, is simply not noticed. It's the punctuation, the tagging, ...that helps know how a voice would "phrase" those words....
A textwriter, then, is for writing, as you might talk, punctuated text. But we've always used more than just the handful of marks that make up the tagset mastered in school. We've later additions like the ellipsis (...) and the dash (--). Then, there are subtle ones usually showing up only in an "interface" copy with the help of a typesetter. Italics and boldface are examples. You could do boldface on an old Underwood. Just type over the passage. Italics, though, had to wait for the typesetter. Poets used indents, unexpected line breaks multiple skipped lines. But we ...they were weird.
There are all sorts of shifts, in voice or rendering, and any c'n be punctuation, c'n function as tags. But with something like HTML what we're given is a set of actual tags. These are punctuation "marks." So, from PocketPad 1.1 on ...my ewriters were becoming what you could call textwriters and htmlwriters. A writer wriotes that "interface" text while typing the "engine" text.
What's truly new is the Tagset menu. Not the things on it, but the menu itself. XML is not a super-HTML and, in fact, is not a "tagset" at all. A tagset has to be made (defined). HTML is made using SGML -- which you can think of as a language in which tagsets are defined. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is SGML-lite-plus. The net result is that a community of writers and readers can define a tagset they will use for their own punctuated "text." Of course, they'll have to build their own "browsers" to get at the "interface" copy.
Internet Explorer uses some XML in 4.0 and more in the 5.0 being tested now. Netscape Navigator uses some in their 4.?, I think. But, they do not use it in any way to help those "communities of readers and writers." Uh, uh, they use it so they c'n vend more subtle "extentions" with their bloatware, offer developers "tools" to help in their vendings. Not kind.
You may know that some folks in Norway (I think) have come out with a small, light, fast, customizable browser called Opera. I haven't used it. People i know say it's good ...and moves from bloatware. Maybe they work in a garage (like old times). My thought is that one day soon, there'll be such a grass-roots browser for an every-community's XML browser. In letters I sort of code name it XOpera ...to catch the idea, not to steal an association. (And I couldn't write such a thing.) I figure it'll have a built in base tagset that is HTML 3.2 innards (not using the frame elements like <HTML>), and, then, it'll handle any community's tagset, whether DTD or just "well-formed," and simple style sheets or allow the new tag to be styled by association with one of the base (format) tags or a sequence of them. Simple? Or so difficult it'd drive programmers out of the garage? I don't know. But it seems to me that the Opera innards'd be pretty much a base to tinker from.
The Tagset menu has three items at the top. And the tagset menu itself doesn't even show, though there are some items below the three that will be above the tagset the user will build in. There is a clickable label item that gets a mini-manual. Then, there's Add Tag and Remove Tag. Each gets instructions before an input box. Once you've built a set of tags and saved settings at the end of the session, you have a complete block in ewriter.ini which you can copy out to another file in which you build up a collection of such sets to swap in and out of ewriter.ini.
As always, I allow anybody who's seen an older version discover what's new. But in keeping with this note on the evolution of eWriter ...beyond these new papers in the eManual, there are new entries in several of the topics in the WinHelp file as well as the new entries on eXtensible Markup and Tagsets. And on the Help menu the first getting started appeared, I think, in 0.9i and new ones were added in 0.9j. I don't think anything new there in k or l. A little rewriting, maybe.
I've made the usual repairs, bug swats. I've had autoscaling for many releases but just found that autoscrolling was also on ...and that can interfere with the scaling. So, though nobody has complained and Delphi (which leaves both on as defaults) may even have gotten autoscrolling out of the way if autoscaling is on. Dunno.
Doing something new allows improvement of the old. I had Tagset in 0.9i. In 0.9j, I added that group of power items above the tagset and improved the set at the bottom of the XML menu. what's new in 0.9l that's vital is that I've fixed all 15 slots for the tagset so that if an item is clicked (or keyed) with text selected, a tag pair will envelop that selected text. If there is a single ("empty element) tag, the text will not be selected and the tag will be at the end of it. In doing this, I looked back at the items from the HTML menu that I'd set up this way, listed them, and say that List item wasn't one of them. So, I fixed that. Now, it's easier to insert list tags above and below a set of paragraphs and, then, select each paragraph and make it a list item with a single key stroke or click of the mouse.
This sort of thing always goes on, of course. The releases? I started eWriter at 0.8 because I saw a friend do that to make a program free (beta). I guess I got up to about 0.8g or h, and decided the thing was looking pretty well complete and jumped to 0.9. Hah! Only days later, it was 0.9a. Evolution works like that.
Gene Fowler
September, 1998