Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!sri-unix!quintus!pds From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: How 'Bout HyperCard! Message-ID: <956@sandino.quintus.UUCP> Date: 10 May 88 21:19:51 GMT References: <15372@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <31411@linus.UUCP> Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA Lines: 37 Summary: Just the clipboard isn't enough In article <31411@linus.UUCP>, sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk) writes: > I would like to see a variety of hypermedia and hypertext software > products for the Amiga. If *any* machine was a natural for hypermedia > and hypertext, it's the Amiga. > ... > What's important is support for the clipboard device so you can paste > among products. I wish more software vendors supported this for the > Amiga. Unfortunately, the clipboard isn't enough. Yes, you can use it to move text from one application to another. But what's needed is a way to move ANYTHING from one application to another. I have two reservations, a minor one and a major one. First the minor one. I think clipping is not as good a metaphor as selection. I'd rather have a SELECTION: device that supports the operations of setting and finding the current selection. This seems better in terms of user interface (it only takes one action -- selecting something somehow, rather than two -- selecting something and then cutting or copying it). It's also probably better in terms of memory usage and performance: setting the selection only requires setting a pointer, rather than copying a (potentially huge) chunk of memory). Ok, my big reservation about clipboards: they really NEED to be object-oriented. When I select (or copy/cut) a spreadsheet, or animation, or picture, or chunk of a wysiwyg document, it needs to carry along with it information about how to manipulate it, or AT LEAST how to display it. The only general way to do this that I know of is with code. The code needs to be encapsulated with the data. Someone needs to spec an abstract datatype (object-oriented) object structure and a standard set of messages (operations) that all such objects are expected to perform, e.g., display, highlight, unhighlight, and print. -- -Peter Schachte pds@quintus.uucp ...!sun!quintus!pds