Miscellaneous-B

Thinking about “killer apps” I figured that what people would like is something a simple to use as PowerPoint but for creating whole web sites.

The basic idea is to find a happy medium between structured content and a DWIM/direct manipulation interface.

PowerPoint seems to manage this by encoding the structure in a set of pre-defined template-like pages that the user can then edit and change to their heart’s content. “Fields” are available, but about the only things that are actively used by the majority are the footer fields (date, title, page number).

PowerPoint’s problem is also simplified cf web site creation in that “structure” amounts to linear order of pages. For a web site we’ll need to provide a simple way to reflect the concept of linked pages.

At the moment, my “killer idea” is little more than the concept of templated page structure reflecting the notions of menu bars either down the left side or across the top of the page and to allow pages to be “tagged” as appearing in the menu.

Actually, reflecting on my recent use of “Image Rodeo”, it seems like a very cool starting point for doing something like this – templates themselves may be a little difficult to construct at the moment, but if the outline structure were extended a little to incorporate multiple named attributes per entry, and “aliases” in the outline to allow for graphs, then I think we could get a long way.