Sensor Requirements From Collaborative Writing Perspective

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

In response to Hill's writeup of the MDSE design review:

So sensors are no longer attached to bags? To try to feed a little 
frontend-based requirement analysis on the sensor issue, let 
me tell you what I see as the sensor-granularity requirement 
for the collaborative writing frontend:

We must be able to alert the user when changes have been made, 
or links have been attached, on a document-section by document-section 
basis.

What is a document section? To recap the frontend design conversations, 
 a natural break for the "document" in the Xanadu sense is the 
"document section" in the paper sense. In small paper documents, 
the document itself corresponds directly to a Xanadu document; 
in medium-size paper documents, the Chapter would correspond 
to the Xanadu document; in large paper documents an object like, 
 "1.2.3. Specification Of Frontend Link Representation" would 
correspond to the Xanadu document.

As a consequence, when I heard on the first day that the sensor 
would be attached to the Bag, I was a bit concerned because every 
document section would have to go into a separate Bag (Drexler 
assured us that the Bags would be "light", so I wasn't real upset, 
but still concerned). 

Can we meet this granularity requirement efficiently? (I confess, 
I'd like even finer granularity a lot better, but we can ship 
product with this level of granularity).

--marcs