Literate programming
SIGDOC '96 Proceedings of the 14th annual international conference on Systems documentation: Marshaling new technological forces: building a corporate, academic, and user-oriented triangle
Query by templates: a generalized approach for visual query formulation for text dominated databases
IEEE ADL '97 Proceedings of the IEEE international forum on Research and technology advances in digital libraries
An examination of software engineering work practices
CASCON '97 Proceedings of the 1997 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
A framework to provide integrated online documentation
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Live documents with contextual, data-driven information components
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
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As online information becomes more comprehensive in its scope, the sheer wealth of information can be overwhelming. Information needs to be both browsable and searchable, and both needs are best met with a structured information approach (such as SGML or XML).Browsing assumes a primary sequence of all information, which is unlikely to be appropriate for all readers. Searching assumes no primary sequence: information is sorted by relevance for a particular query, creating any number of ad hoc sequences as a result. However, the criteria for relevance specified in the search is unlikely to be reflected within the returned topics: they are usually still structured in a way that reflects the primary browsing path. For example, a search of API information for a description of a specific method returns a description of the entire class where it is declared, because API documentation is organized around classes, even though this particular search has nothing to do with classes.One way to resolve this tension (between linear display and multidimensional search) is with multiple documents that capture various useful ways of looking at the same information. However, the number of possible views and the growing size of information bases can make static generation of such views prohibitively expensive.The ideal solution would be a dynamically assembled document, in which the information base is so comprehensively structured that it can be meaningfully reconstructed into any number of relevant documents, whose derived structures reflect the needs of a particular reader and environment.This is a speculative paper that looks at what the interface to a dynamically assembled document might look like.