Patrick Logan mentioned using XML for a file-out format for more elaborate code and documentation systems in an earlier message, and it might serve well as a basis for such semantic structuring/tagging also. The draft of the XML standard is at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml.html
-- Dwight
-----Original Message----- From: Mike Klein mike@twinsun.com To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu squeak@cs.uiuc.edu Date: Monday, December 29, 1997 1:07 PM Subject: Re: New comment delimiter?
| |> From gr@fuzzy.uba.ar Thu Dec 25 01:24:16 1997 | |> Just an idea: |> What if we use the color and/or size of the text to show if it's a |> comment for programers, a comment for users, just a comment, or anything |> else? |> It has some problemas like storing all that information as text (HTML may |> help?), and it also makes you learn some color codes to understand what's |> written (size can help for this problem), but it has |> a very nice pro: You can write a book in this way, with titles, |> subtitles, superscripts (?), etc. and of course embedded examples! |> |> What do you think? | |So what you really seem to want is some informational tag on the comments, |so you can tell, for example, the intended audience. (I certainly wouldn't |mind setting the color of the copyright notice comments to transparent :-). |This is, loosely speaking, a meta-comment... a comment about the comment. |Of course in a reflective system, one can add a semantic component even to |comments. Sounds like a good idea. Important to to have some kind of |"standard" so we can all at least have some inkling of what these |meta-comments mean. Also, divorce the idea of physical markup from the |semantic tagging. In outher words, the author of a comment may tag it as |being for lawyers only. It should be the viewer's responsibilty to map |these tags to actual emphases, be they colors for the non-color-blind, |font-sizes for the color-blind, voice-intonation for the totally blind, |or even elided for the legallly-apathetic. There could also be standard |mappings, aka style-sheets. | |Of course it would be nice if we could tag all components to the source, |not just the comment. I think it would be way cool if Squeak's methods |and classes were tagged with a "difficulty level". Beginers' browsers |would show things like #do: before #inject:into: and OrderedCollection |before Metaclass. | | Ramblings after the holidays... | | -- Mike Klein |