About the OpenDoc Human Interface (OD PG)

Inside Macintosh: OpenDoc Programmer's Guide / Part 3 - Human Interface Guidelines: Chapter 12 - Basic Interface Elements

About the OpenDoc Human Interface
In OpenDoc, users focus primarily on creating content. Because OpenDoc is document centered rather than application centered, users interact far more with your parts than with your part editor. They manipulate your parts' content, in the context of other related parts, to achieve a task. Because the software that manipulates the document is mostly hidden from the user, users do not explicitly launch or switch applications as they edit separate parts. The OpenDoc human interface guidelines are designed to facilitate that focus on parts and content. By following them, you will enhance the consistency and smoothness the user experiences while editing multiple parts of a compound document.
Key to the OpenDoc human interface is that it embraces a wide range of concepts in what constitutes a part. OpenDoc does not limit users to creating content commonly found in paper documents. Many OpenDoc documents do not resemble paper documents at all. An OpenDoc document can contain many kinds of media (text, graphics, movies, sounds, animations), and it can also represent very different kinds of functionality (file access, database access, Internet access, telephony, spreadsheet manipulation, and so on).