Another Radically Tailorable Resource

Avi adopted the phrase "radically tailorable". Great. I like that phrase quite a bit.

Here's another reference that has influenced my thinking long before this post. This should also be in the Lieberary, but some links seem broken.

This paper presents a kit called EZWin, which provides many services common to implementing a wide variety of interfaces, described as generalized editors for sets of graphical objects. An individual application is programmed simply by creating objects to represent the interface itself, each kind of graphical object, and each command. A unique interaction style is established which is insensitive to whether commands are chosen before or after their arguments.

The system anticipates the types of arguments needed by commands, preventing selection mistakes which are a common source of frustrating errors. Displayed objects are made "mouse-sensitive" only if selection of the object is appropriate in the current context. The implementation of a graphical interface for a computer network simulation is described to illustrate how EZWin works.