FromNess, ToNess

[Ravi Pandya <ravi>]

Date: Wed, 31 Jan 90 10:42:15 PST
   From: marcs (Marc Stiegler)

   I do not know how sophisticated ravi's waldos have become, but to me
   the clear reason why we want to open up orgls is so that people can
   create new kinds of documents. Please note that in a short handful
   of months, while working hard to keep the rest of the world out of 
   our hair, we saw fit to create 3 kinds of documents ourselves: the
   basic document used for passages, the hierarchical document used for
   inclusion lists, and the graphics document for AutoCAD. I am pretty
   sure we will want to introduce another kind of document for Hypercard-like
   frontends; we've already discussed it, and the reason we didn't do
   it already is that we don't need it yet.

With the current D&L design, 3rd parties can make their own document
types built out of the pieces we supply, and they will be on an equal
footing with system types (except that there's no guarantee another
front end will know what to do with them). What they can't do with
D&L is create new kinds of orgls with different coordinate spaces. My
understanding was that they wouldn't be able to do this after we open
up B&O either, since they could trash the ent that way.

The fact that we have had to design new kinds of orgls means that
other might, and perhaps we should think about the issues involved in
allowing them to do so. Not an easy problem, and one that we can solve
after first product.
	--ravi