Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 13:12:12 -0700
| From: |
Eric Armstrong |
|
Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com |
| To: | unrev2 unrev-II@onelist.com, |
|
critters |
| Subject: | Traction, by Twisted Systems] |
Below are Chris Nuzum's excellent responses to the open questions I had in my Traction overview. The only "gaps" in the system appear to be:
This is something I neglected to mention previously. so Chris might have a response to this, as well. The idea is having the ability to record evaluative comments, along with a rating (e.g. 1..5), that can be averaged, so that entries can be sorted by rating.
I seem to be in a minority on this subject. So maybe it's not as relevant as I think it is. Chris says below that adding "not yet read" flags isn't that much overhead -- the real issue is an interface decision: deciding what constitutes "read". (Went through that same question myself. Decided that the two mail systems I've seen got it right: A configurable number of seconds after you've visited a node counts as "read", plus you can always change it back.
Chris points out that you can do individual reductions by changing the tags on a node. So a mechanism does exist that allows for reduction. I'm still seeing an "edit copy of subtree" operation that allows me to reorganize nodes, remove them, and then post the new version of the tree as a replacement -- but that is a fairly document-centric operation. When "documents" are totally virtual, resulting from a query of database nodes, its hard to see exactly what such an operation implies -- what happens to the nodes I deleted with respect to other views?? Still, I expect there is an answer somewhere.
Sincerely,
Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
The system was presented as a "hypertext journaling
system". The web site calls it a "web journal". That
synopsis does a serious injustice, in my opinion. To
me, that doesn't really sound like much -- and I didn't
look very deeply at it when I visited the site. But the
demo convinced me that I had missed a diamond.
Thanks for the compliment. We've worked hard on this, and as we all
know from Doug's experience,, getting the message out about this kind
of system can be difficult.
Traction lets remote correspondents investigate, explore,
and collaborate on ideas -- tracking them as they are
gathered and saving them in a queryable database running
on a Java-based server that is accessed through a Web browser.
At the moment, the system is SGML-based, but they are
investigating and XML-ization of it.
Actually, what I meant was that our background was in SGML systems;
Greg Lloyd and I met at EBT, where we worked on DynaText. Traction
makes extensive use of XML tools, including Pierre Richard's excellent
XML parser and XSL transformer -- see
...for info on Pierre's current venture, Jaxo.
Geographically speaking, Traction was mostly designed and built in
Providence, RI and Washington, DC. The parser and transformer were
imported from France. The distributed team uses Traction as its
primary coordination vehicle.
Hierarchy
The system seems to function with a two-level hierarchy,
at least from the demo I saw. There are headers and
paragraphs. Paragraphs are added when people add comments.
[I'm not sure where the headers came from. A depth-two
hierarchy may be limiting for some purposes, but there may
also be a fair amount that can be accomplished within that
structure, and there may be deeper structuring we just
didn't see.]
In our terminology, the Traction "journal" collects "entries" in
"projects". Entries may be of various types, corresponding to
different XML content models. So far, the main type we have
implemented and use is based on an email message with n paragraphs
(actually HTML block containers). The first paragraph is rendered as
the subject, the rest as body. Each one is addressable.
Traction lets you choose the paragraphs to display,
depending on their tags. Their "rapid selector" box
allows abbreviations [or requires them?] so you can
change the view rapidly.
Allows... but who really wants to write "newspage week today" when
they can write "nwt"?
They use Internet Explorer [4? 5?] and used the
"whole-screen expansion" function which had the
interesting effect of pushing the URL and toolbar
buttons off screen. The interface they provided to the
Traction DB then "takes over", so you pretty much forget
you are in a browser -- it looks like an app.
I demonstrated Traction using IE 5 on Windows, but it works just as
well with IE 4 and Netscape 4.x. Hit F11 in IE to go to full-screen
mode; right-click on the top toolbar and select auto-hide to get rid
of it. Right click on the task bar, select properties, and check
auto-hide to get rid of it. I wish Netscape had a similar full-screen
browsing feature. It's very addictive.
Editing looked a lot like using a normal editor. When the
editor came up, it showed a serious of paragraphs, and you
could then add new paragraphs between them. The editing
therefore took place "in context", rather than being in
a blank window.
[Q: I saw that new paragraphs could be added. But I didn't
see whether a paragraph could be edited. I suspect it
should be possible, but don't know for sure.]
You *can* edit the paragraphs. Next to each paragraph we display a
marker, e.g. [04]. It's this marker to which the labels (tags) are
attached.
Chris said they used "simple linear versioning". [By that,
I presume he mean chronological versions, with no branching
of versions. Need to clarify.]
That's correct. We call the versioning mechanism "update" (used to be
"correct"), and we originally intended it to allow you to fix errors
or reflect changes in fact.
Editing capabilities were restricted by access controls. So
it seemed to be possible to limit changes to the designated
author(s). [I seem to recall that it was possible to add
someone to the author list, but I'm not sure if I really heard
that.]
Permissions include read, submit, update, reclassify, create category,
administer project, administer server. They are scoped to projects.
It was possible to refer to other nodes in the database, the
demo did that using a name and number, like "Traction348".
Although normal hypertext links weren't shown, they are almost
certainly usable. [Yes?]
Sure; click any cross-reference to follow it. All URLs are recognized
and become active links. Links within the journal are bi-directional.
Drag and drop depends on the interface you are using; Outlook and IE
support it. Other browsers vary.
All in all, the system seemed to be good deal closer to a
usable DKR than anything I have seen to date. If nothing else,
we should probably use it to help carry on our discussions of
where to go next -- both for the advantages it offers over
email and for the opportunity of "springboarding" to define
the next level of desirable features.
The major limitations observed so far are:
Inclusion
They use Ted Nelson's term "transclusion" for this. At the
moment, you can link to other items in the database, but you
can't include them inline. They are carrying on discussions
now on how to go about that.
Right. Until we integrated the XSL transformer, there was a danger of
violating the HTML content model when transcluding arbitrary other
segments of the journal. We've come so close to "just doing it",
because it's such an appealing feature, but we wanted to make sure it
wouldn't cause support problems; you might be surprised at how badly
browsers can get wedged when you feed them mangled HTML. But now we
can hardly wait to turn it on! We do (carefully) already transclude
the title when displaying cross-references; when the title is updated,
all cross-links will reflect the change.
Other problems with transclusion include interface issues relating to
whether you expect to find fulltext search hits in in/transcluded
content, how you address into included content... doing this feature
right does get a little tricky (when I talked with Doug about this
yesterday, he said they had run into the same questions, and that
nobody had "funded the research" to answer them :-)
[Is it possible to create hierarchies that are more than two
levels deep? Is there some reason that *isn't* desirable?]
Our categories *can* be n levels deep. Perhaps the confusion came in
when I explained that we have some predefined structure at the root
level.
::project:partition:you:can:go:as:deep:as:you:like
Partitions include topic, action, discussion, resource and "response"
or "semantic". Topic is the "default" partition, so
::project:topic:news is the same as ::project:news.
We support wildcards in the Rapid Selector to allow you, for example,
to look at ::*:*:open.
[There is a versioning system, but does it apply to replacing
one hierarchy with an edited copy that has nodes deleted? That
would allow a discussion to be replaced with a reformulated,
reorganized version. I seem to recall Chris saying something
about selecting multiple nodes when creating a new one, but I'm
unclear about what happened after that.]
There is a "summary" capability, but it is intended for high
level abstractions, rather than the kind of "reformulation"
I have been envisioning. (I've been calling that process
"summary" but Rod's questions pretty convinced me I had the
wrong name for it, and this demo pounds in the final nail.
(Chris mentioned that the "summary" capability hasn't seen much
use so far. I suspect that is because summaries appear outside
the normal stream of access, rather than as an integral part of
the information stream.
This *might* be the one major gap in the system -- the ability
to replace an entire hierarchy (or chain of discussion) with an
edited version of same. That capability is necessary to convert
a great "journaling" system in an even greater "knowledge
repository".
Regarding summary and reduction...
Summary in Tration lets to take some set of entries and post a new
entry which "summarizes" the other set. Whenever you look at any
entry, you can see what entries summarize it. Summaries are listed in
order of most specific to most general; a summary of a specific set of
entries would be listed before a summary of the month, which would in
turn be listed before a summary of the year.
Summaries of a time period are displayed on the newspage covering the
time period. So you can post a status report on Monday morning
summarizing last week, and it will appear on last week's newspage.
For the idea of reduction, note that the primary method Traction
currently has for threading discussions is by tagging the relevant
messages (or paragraphs) with the discussions to which they belong,
e.g. this paragraph might be part of :discussion:traction.
If you later want to prune the thread, or post a summary, you can just
change what entries (or paragraphs) are labeled
":discussion:traction". The ones not labeled will fade into the
background (unless you go looking for them using Traction's
perspective control). While not exactly what you are looking for, it
is a form of reduction which you might find interesting to work with;
we use it extensively.
[In another letter Eric submitted to the Colloquium that is not reported in
the record...]
Since the system isn't distributed, there is no way to identify
new and changed nodes that *you* haven't read. (Or maybe there is,
but it is going to be a ton of extra work for the server.)
With a distributed system (like email) it becomes possible to
more easily identify changes and new material, as well as keep
track of material that has not been visited.
Actually, this isn't too much overhead to add. We've thought a lot
about it. Many people have suggested it. Interestingly, we don't
really miss it much day-to-day.
We use labels to flag things for each others attention (e.g. someone
who wants me to see something tags it :cjn), and we use labels to
indicate when we have completed something, (e.g. cjn:done).
We can also use labels to indicate read & understood. The real
interface issue for marking something read is "what constitutes read?"
Shoud we mark read those entries which have
We have lots of suggestions on how we might incorporate the; it's been
more of an interface puzzle than a technical hurdle.
Copy to:
[Evidently these are extracted remarks by Chris Nuzum...]
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
Eric Armstrong wrote
14 Apr 2000 15:12:03
- in just a single-entry view,
- on a newspage you've looked at,
- only those that you have explicitly checked off.