Re: [Axiom-developer] browser front end, statement of plans and progress

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hello Tim,

On 01/27/2007 06:39 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> I've been looking deeply into the problem of using a web browser
> as the front end for axiom. There are 3 components:
>
> 1) replace the graphics
> 2) replace hyperdoc
> 3) make an interactive front end

[snip]

> Consider problem 2, replace hyperdoc.
>
> I've already coded portions of hyperdoc in javascript and am now
> learning AJAX so that I can fetch pages and images from an axiom
> session. Also in plan is to be able to dynamically show results
> from the axiom session when looking up search and query information.
>
> Hyperdoc used to have its own language for display but this is dead
> and gone. I've been recoding the hyperdoc pages into html so they
> use a standard format. This will allow anyone to code web pages without
> any training. It should also allow us to embed pamphlets as pdf in pages.
>
> The low level task is to recode the hyperdoc info into html and
> javascript (in process), factor in new function for handling 
> pamphlets and hyperlinking to non-axiom data, and using either
> mathml or some other smooth symbol output.
>
> Hyperdoc can display both static (easy) and dynamic (somewhat harder)
> graphics output so I'm stalled on the conversion while I work thru 
> the graphics details.

HyperDoc also shows the API of SPAD programs, in particular the ++ 
comments. I know that you tend to remove the ++ stuff in favour of 
literate programs, but their may be people (like me) who want to have 
both. I would rather like to see a concise API description from where I 
can quickly see that the function does what I would like it to do. Of 
course that doesn't prevent us from putting a link to the actual 
literate program part of the function into the API description. (Note 
that I don't want to get rid of the literate programming idea, I just 
want a different view on the documentation that pretty much looks like 
an API description.)

Since you want to bring the documentation to html, what do you expect as 
the input? If hyperdoc goes away, I probably guess rightly, that you 
also want to remove hypertex, right?

[snip]

Ralf