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hacking hacking hacking

I've been doing some guerilla hacking on zowie. Starting from the SDL and Cairo bindings for Chicken, I added some makeshift protocols for building and rendering scenegraphs, then classes representing some graphical primitives and a camera. A small bit of fooling around with events and we can zoom in and out on a simple scene with transparent, filled and stroked rectangles and text.

The next step is to add an MVC layer; the views I am (perhaps cheekily) calling 'zorphs'. Soon I should have input event handling, damage reporting, and the other basic stuff I need to for user interaction. Go the hacking!

Reasoning in Zowie

From the magical red notebook, scribblings:

  RDF model :—
    Choose what relations mean: linked? 
                                contained?
                                ignored?

So, you have all these semantic relations between chunks of things; you decide what display relations correspond to the semantic relations. The display relations are things like navigation hierarchy, spatial containment, linking.

  In the ZUI, the display of relations determines what
  gestures mean.

I.e., if you drop an item into a box you are asserting a semantic relation between the item and the box. This is nothing but direct manipulation. These can be contextual as well; for example, if you create a link between a text fragment and [something representing] a person, you might be asserting a 'creator' relationship; but, make a link between a text fragment and another text fragment and you are building a narration.

This might fix a fundamental problem with the idea of multiple views (I want to keep Zowie's model honest, so the idea is to plan to have multiple views from the outset). The problem is this: You can't influence things important to one view from other views. For example, spatial layout in the ZUI is (likely) missing from a Web site view. When the dimensions are choosable, though, it doesn't matter so much. The spatial layout matters only so far as it implies semantic relations — to-the-right-of might mean narrative succession, for example.

I am making a hash of explaining this. I should just write some code.

Zowie and RDF

TonyG talking about RDF made me remember about a note I made regarding categorisation:

Index things by their connection of ideas

I think this refers to "Quicksilver", in which Daniel Waterhouse is trying to reduce all things to their component attributes. In "The Confusion" (ibid), Leibniz assigns prime numbers to ideas, and plans to use the product of these ideas to catalogue books.

Another note from the magical red book:

Correspondence with - items in Zowie (shapes, text) - rooms in a MUD - pages in a wiki

This sounds like a clue of what basic relations there are: derived spatial relations (positions on a canvas); asserted spatial relations ("there is an exit to the north"); referrals (wikiwords). Each view on Zowie specializes in expressing certain relations; you might be able to squeeze more and common relations in, like using containment on the canvas and in the wiki.