Can java be speeded up this way

[Roedy Green]

Perhaps an icon system, where the icons represent intent. E.g. the
semantics of one particular icon might be "If you're a compiler writer, you
need to read this!"

Even better, the displayer KNOWS your intent and so automatically
hides or reveals stuff, with you able at any point able to adjust the
detail level.

Sometimes I want to just skim something to get a rough idea of what is
is for and what it can do before I invest time learning how to use it.
so I would read the book twice.

The author does a lot more writing that now, and the readers do a lot
less reading.

 

[Oliver Wong]

You then can develop profiles of readers, and use AI to figure out
which profile or group of readers you fit into. Decisions on what to
show are based on what other people like you found easy or hard.

I'm not so keen on this idea. Imagine the following newsgroup thread:

How do I find out?

etc.

- Oliver

 

[js_dev]

Computer documentation could greatly benefit from this convention.
Most of it is reams and reams of the obvious, with tiny dots of
surprise.

I wrote an essay on how it might work. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/author.html

I read it all. Way ahead of its time.(In internet time, that could mean
another three years?) It is very well thought out but considering the
speed of adaptation of non-computer industries, a downsized version
looks realistic. I mean, for now and for open, free documents like
manuals, say a compiled help manual or a wiki, you can have the option
of compiling the sections and paragraphs in different sequences based
on your criteria - and the resultant manuals mostly contain the same
material but arranged and/or filtered by different criteria - that can
be done quickly without having industry open its mind to a bold new
idea. For e.g. the Java manual for beginners, the Java manual for
experts, and so on, so that all the relevant and redundant paragraphs
are clubbed together either to read (for the interested audience) or to
ignore (for everyone else). Paragraph markup and ordering, in short.
All pages in this new e-book format could have little icons on the
borders marking the material as good/"i want this"/"remove this"/etc.
and as I walk off for a cup of coffee, I hit a recompile button - which
reorders the manual for me! Dynamically, over time, the same entire set
of paragraphs and pages will be re-ordered repeatedly, in the first
days, optimized for a beginner, in the later days, more importantly,
showing only the esoteric stuff. Then I can circulate my recompiled
manual using my judgement of what is good for whom, to my colleagues
and so on. In lighter vein, If I want to irritate someone , I send him
a manual compiled for beginners. Coming back, that means the
predominant mode of information transfer will be file-sharing.
Incidentally Google Personalised Search does something slightly similar
and Google is very much into this content-rating business(PageRank).
Also,I believe, it recently expressed its desire to collect _ALL_
information in print just as it is doing with hypertext - does that or
the previous sentence hint at something.....? A new format for
paragraph reordering/filtering is the next step, with a sample program
to display the concept.

Regards,
Joseph S.

 

[Roedy Green]

Presumably ebooks could be told topics to stress, e.g. show me
everything that has any bearing on static, filling in enough to make a
coherent whole. Think of it more as removing material not relevant to
understanding the static material, and of course removing material the
reader already knows.

The problem with information primarily is overload. You need ways of
pruning out anything non essential. The problem with search engines
is they home you to a single sentence, without giving you any context.
In particular HELP on menu commands never tell you how to GET to that
part of the menu tree. They don't give an easy way to get some of the
terminology used explained.

You see help of the form: set the skurtelwax property. Duh? but what
is a skurtelwax? What are the possible choices. Why would I pick one
over the other? You want that fleshed out with other relevant
material that may be discussed elsewhere. Perhaps autocrosslinking to
definitions and from there to detailed discussion would help.