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It’s hard not to think this 90s “document turducken” trend was driven by engineers, rather than coming out of any real user need. We still don’t work this way,
by turnsout 3y ago
It’s hard not to think this 90s “document turducken” trend was driven by engineers, rather than coming out of any real user need. We still don’t work this way, though it would be easier than ever now with web technology. It turns out, links work just fine and are dramatically simpler on both a conceptual and technical level.
- aaronharnly 3y agoI agree. Though the “spreadsheet table in a document” use case was always the first demo, and is still a common use case. It was probably also the only real use case with any staying power.
- tambourine_man 3y agoHaving the full power of an image editor on any picture anywhere was the second. Sometimes I think there was something to that architecture. Sometimes it just seems overly complex.
- bombcar 3y ago"Chart based on a spreadsheet that you can update later" is the real place it shines. If you try to have two documents, the spreadsheet always gets lost.
- detourdog 3y agoI was an idealist at the time and was very much on board with SOM (system object model by IBM COM was Microsoft model). The people who truly knew what they were doing always had turnsout position. Cyberdog was the only application I used as my daily drivers for all things internet. None of the other exampls ended up being useful in anyway. My guess is that SOM and COM are the type of tech only a behemoth could love.
- KerrAvon 3y agoturnsout position? Cyberdog was the only good use of OpenDoc I ever saw, and it was never interesting as a part of OpenDoc. It was just really good set of internet apps that happened to be implemented as OpenDoc parts. If the developers had implemented them as regular Mac apps, Apple would have been ahead of the game.
- detourdog 3y agoTurnsout stated in the earlier post that it wasn't practical. I was responding that I remember disregarding the same sentiment from people trying to teach me. I thought cyberdog was great and definitely used until as my mine internet app for mail and browsing until at IE 5 on Aqua and Mail.app.
- a-dub 3y agolinks?! lol have you ever actually seen the modern web front end tech planet up close? i mean, i agree i'm with ya. links are all you really need, but you know...
- turnsout 3y agoThat was my point—you can do all kinds of things on the web now, but people don’t really create these multi source meta-documents. Unless you count a TikTok embed or something.
- a-dub 3y agolooks like there's some limited cross application embedding support in google docs, so i'd argue you're right except for one glaring exception.... jupyter notebooks and donald knuth's literate programming dream. duh duh dunnnnn. crash buut. to your point, maybe there's a fable in there. existing large systems should be coupled in interface and presentation, but not necessarily in implementation!