Article 4422 of alt.thinking.hurts:
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From: froggy@praline.no.neosoft.com (Carlos May)
Newsgroups: alt.thinking.hurts,alt.fan.tito,alt.fan.jenn.politics
Subject: Paper and the web: Calm is good.
Date: 19 Apr 1997 17:41:22 GMT
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 ----crossposted for your edification by froggy@neosoft.com----

[ Article crossposted from dur.test,alt.dur.general,oxbridge.tat,misc.misc ]
[ Author was Dan Sheppard ]
[ Original thread title: Cross University Posture. Hurrah! ]
[ Posted on 18 Apr 1997 19:05:44 GMT ]


David Marshall:
>
>I don't see why you have to impose paper's limitations and customs to
>the screen.
>

You don't have to, but one thing about paper which is as important as
all this wizardary is paper is calm. It doesn't contain moving images
to distract the attention, it doesn't spontaneously resize to cover
your entire desk, or disappear into a little button which you have to
press to recover it. It doesn't spontaneously turn into another piece
of paper. It doesn't make a ta-da sound whenever I look at it, it's
reasonably permanent, I can't with a flick of my wrist remove its
contents or make it into large flaching yellow cyrillic. It does what
you tell it to, and when you tell it to do nothing, it does nothing.

                            Paper is calm.

It looked for a while that paper could be augmented, calmly, with
hypertext, which allowed cross-referencing, something paper wasn't
very good at. But look at a typical corperate web-page now, it appears
to be in a state of constant alarm, like a vietnam veteran running knife
in hand, screaming, through the University Library.

WordPerfect for DOS emulated one application of paper well toom the
interface was almost as simple as holding a pen. Press this for bold,
that for italic, that for underline, no more complex than changing
writing implement in the real world. There's a few things you couldn't
do, who cares, this wasn't paper, but it was as calm as paper. Now
you've got Word for Windows version 8. Saying that your wordprocessor
is more like paper because it contains a white rectangle on which
symbols appear is rediculous. Buttons appear from nowhere with bizzare
brightly lit symbols on them, menus, status bars all kinds of things
demanding to be pressed, pulled down, popped up, selected, and
activated. This isn't calm paper, it's like walking up to a piece of
paper and having to use it via the controls of a VCR-timer-from-hell.

Interactivity is bad, unless it provides something in
return. Hypertext is good because it _reduces_ interaction, I need
only select between one of a few related documents, not search
indices. Web indexes are good, because it involves interacting with
fewer on-line indices each covering their own area.

Look at clocks. Clocks aren't very interactive. When was the last time
you heard someone saying "bloody clocks, I hate clocks, you can never
tell what they're doing". Calculators are more interactive,


                     In any application there should
                     be the minimum of interaction
                     required to get a job done.

Minimise interaction through _novel_ interaction techniques and you've
calmed your program down.

Lynx is calm, TeX is calm, ghostview is calm, clock is calm, xload is calm.



                            Calm is good.


Dan.
--
Electric mechanical all that is new
Which does the work that men used to do.
He swears by it all and he proves it too
On his modern mechanical farm.