🚀 go-pugleaf

dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk (Denis Howe) writes:

>In article <1992Aug5.225742.1752@cs.aukuni.ac.nz>
>jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA) wrote:

>>if you have some data in a standard format (text, sprite, drawfile,
>>etc) that needs to be edited, then you should just be able to invoke
>>another application to go away and edit that data, and return the
>>data to you when the editing is finished.

>I achieved something similar using an existing editor in the following
>way:

>The client application saves the data in a temporary file.
>It broadcasts a Message_DataOpen for that file.
>The editor loads the file and acknowledges the message.
>The client deletes the file.
>The client looks periodically to see if the file exists.
>The user edits and saves it from the editor in the usual way.
>The client notices that the file exists again and re-loads it.

This was what I was thinking of, but I decided on a couple of new
messages to
  a) Stop you having to slave off disc (RAM transfers)
  b) Save you having to "trick" the OS/editor into doing it- both
     the client AND editor KNOW what is going on
     (e.g. no room for accidents, and the editor can do stuff like using
     a title "(ImpressDoc) TextStory" to indicate that you are editing
     a thing called "TextStory" from inside the document "ImpressDoc")
  c) More data-types can be designed. E.g. text is data-type &fff
     But what about RTF format? TeX? C code? pascal source? etc?
     These could be given special data-types, so that (for example) an
     RTF file will go to an RTF editor (e.g.Impression) if one is available,
     but will default to being edited as 'straight text' if only !Edit is
     available.
  d) You broadcast a *request*, and an editor replies if it is available,
     rather than having to detect what editors are available yourself.

>to get info about running tasks?)  Then you could have a proper
>conversation with them rather than just throwing your data out and
>hoping someone will edit it.

Exactly. The new messages simply define a proper way of conversing about
the subject, instead of hacking and hoping and guessing... and "old"
messages such as DataLoad are still included in the protocol as much as
possible, so as little extra work as possible is needed to implement the
extra features on an existing editor.
-- 
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  /____ _ _/_ __       First in my normal voice, and then
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