Object-Oriented Planning
-
It's possible to apply some of the methods of software
construction to WWW planning and design.
Here are some steps of the software construction process.
- Extensive initial planning is important.
- Depending on the extent of functionality desired, an equivalent
measure of domain knowledge and planning is required. It is easy
to paint a system into a corner without sufficient planning.
- One of the fundamental principles is iteration.
- A system or element of a system is put in place, and in response
to the functioning and functionality of that system, modifications
are discovered and implemented.
- One process of development that is almost always part of the total development effort is dealing with the total system in terms of parts of the system.
- In informal terms, object-oriented evaluation
and implementation of WWW pages is possible. WWW projects consist of
functional parts; those parts can be thought of and designed as
"objects"
that contain their own "working functionality".
Well-contained
and useful objects can be added to a system more easily than other
types of resources.
WWW sub-systems or pages can be thought of and designed in a similar fashion.
Another idea is that very complicated processes, such as representing the overall breadth of knowledge, can be thought of in terms of subordinate parts of the process. Those still very complicated processes can be thought of in terms of their components, and so on until the "object level" is easy to understand and implement.
An example of the process could be a project to print mailing labels for all Texas A&M University students. The project could be thought of in terms of the following parts:
- The name and address data
- The computer system to be used to perform the action
- The language to be used to specify the steps of the action
- The material to be used for the labels, including the physical definition of individual labels within the total material.
- Method of identifying individual name and address data within the total data
- Method of communicating with the printer
- Overall process of accessing total data and specifying individual address data and sending data to printer. The process has to account for resetting new pages of labels and doing location changes within individual pages of labels.
The application to the WWW project is to start with an overall sense of what the system is supposed to provide and how it should provide that service. Then think of the parts of that service as much as individual objects as possible. Continue to consider the elemental features of the individual objects until an easily comprehendable level is reached. Then implement the elements of the object within the object framework.
- In an advertisement for the Object Expo National Conference and Exposition there are some related points.
- One of the sessions at the conference is called Getting
the Requirements Right.
The description of the session is "Getting the requirements right is arguably the single most difficult and most important part of developing software. If you don't get the requirements right, the software will not be completely satisfying to the user and may create more problems than it solves. This session will discuss the four factors working against success: separating the process from the technology; lack of a common language that meets the needs of both user and developer; complexity and our inability to understand the complex systems; and our failure to realize that technology affects the way we use current technology and develop new strategies. Also explored is a way to develop a set of consistent unambiguous requirements that result in an acceptable solution to the user's problem." Emphasis added.
Hopefully, no one will take this more seriously than they should!
Information management through responding to a customer's desire
- A Company should
-
I. respond to its customers' desires.
II. know what the desires are.
III. know what company boundaries are.
IV. provide answers in communication with customers.
Imagine a library where every question that you ask is answered.
Is there a "best" resource for my topic?
Will I be limiting my research by following the best resource?
What time frame approximation is there for this type of process?
How can I get an idea of the time the process will take?
I really would like a personal response from an expert.Build in the idea of the library system receiving questions.
Build in the process of making answers easier to provide and modify and record.
There could be form responses or references for- Access to library bibliographic databases
- Journal article databases
- Use of the WWW service
Methods of Arrangement
- Subject or general topic list, alphabetical listing or index of sources, site list, other states, other countries. Tables of contents are important and bibliographical information is needed. There is a convenient opportunity to present unified information while providing different methods of access. For example, it would be easy to provide subject grouping and an index and a list of Internet sites without creating difficulties in finding information. Different people may have preferences for how to find information. That's not to say that there may not be a best way of locating information, yet it's easy to see that there's more than one direction to approach a topic from.
Examples of very general subject grouping
- Administrative and General Information
Agriculture and Science
Census
Economics and Trade
Education
Government Internet Sites
Law and Legislation
Maps
Patents
How to present a simpler view of information
- Use Multiple files so that information is presented in easily
manageable packages.
Provide access to specific locations within a file through hypertext tables of contents.
Use levels of hypertext, for example, general topics that lead to sub-topics or to references to further information.
Possible information cues: icons, colors, arrangement, headings.
Icons make a difference.
How to make revising WWW information easier
- Automating revisions. It should be easy to
add a file and a link to the home page without having to deal
with the complexities of html. If we keep a consistent arrangement
of the pages, like using a uniform method of listing information,
then it should be possible to have a program deal with the task
of adding a new address and name. A relational database seems
like a good way to store data. It would be nice if the database
had programmable features so that the HTML-specific or printed
report-specific functions could be separate from the basic data.
Database fields. To keep the data for hypertext files in a database, fields have to be defined for the database for the elements of the hypertext items. Here are some of the fields that should be considered for a general application. After the name of the field, there are examples referring to the Texas A&M Home Page.
- Site name Texas A&M University Home Page
- Address www.tamu.edu
- Protocol http
- Description General home page for university in College Station, Texas. Provides access to pages of many of the colleges within the University.
- Subject words Agriculture, Engineering, Science, Business, Education, Texas
- Date added May 15, 1995
- Last date modified May 15, 1995
- Date verified May 15, 1995
- Local file specification none
- Special file location none
- Related gif a_and_m.gif
- Special formatting information none
- Notification date June 1, 1995
There has been some network talk about programs or scripts that can automate the process of verifying that links are still valid.
General templates could provide tags for Status, author, intent, and home page references.
Why Revision May be Necessary
- One thing that I've noticed in working with the
Documents/Microtext
Home page is that sometimes an idea is introduced and not "fully
realized". For example, the help function for the
Documents/Microtext
Home page is a revision of a note sent to Documents/Microtext
staff. In terms of helping anyone who wants to use the information
on the network, the help feature is probably not very helpful.
It's explanatory and it says what the icons mean, yet it wasn't
written in terms of giving a total explanation of how to use the
system. When the feature was first added to the system, I thought
it might be helpful to staff through showing how an ASCII document
could be revised in HTML. Now the document ought to provide the
help that its name implies!
In some cases revision is necessary just to provide good information about dynamic systems, or the total project may be revised when information, descriptions or guides are created and added.
Example of a status statement
- We make the effort to provide useful, accurate, and up-to-date information; however you should not treat it as a substitute for direct reference help, expert advice or legal assistance.
Making Project Communication Easier
- Some of the papers from the 1995 WWW Developers Conference
mention document annotation or linking notes to an existing document.
One way to make annotation easier is to provide a published list
of name tags for the document, so that anyone who wants to refer
to a specific section of a document would have a means of providing
a link to that section of the document. So, if we were putting
together an HTML style guideline, for example, the sections of
the document could have numbered tags like <a name =
"Section1-1">.
Then someone could refer to a given section of a document through
a link such as <a href =
"http://machine.site.domain/directory/document.html#Section1-1">Cf.
Section 1.1</a>.
A published list of name tags may not be necessary because the name tags will be visible within the document source; however, a published list with a sample reference would make it easier to add a note.
Lessons from Digital's WWW Project
- The following comments are based on: Digital's World-Wide
Web Server: A Case Study, Russ Jones, p. 297-306,
Computer
Networks and ISDN Systems, Nov. 1994.
Digital planned to provide "five different views into the same core set of documents".
- Alphabetical document title
- Document type
- Document subject
- Chronological order
- Random Word Search
They had the benefit of definite directory structures for files. Thus, a file's document type could be determined from its directory. File names, data formats and document abstracts were a significant part of the development planning.
A fairly simple style definition was used for pages in general with additional styles for certain major files. The basic style included:
- Company logo at the top of each page
- Meaningful document title that could stand alone
- Level 1 or 2 heading that matched the title as closely as made sense
- Optional subheading in italics
- Two horizontal rules to show the logical top, middle with content, and the last of the file. This separated the control from the content.
- Optional navigation or search hyperlinks
- File creation date
- Initials for the document author
Additional Considerations
- Simpler is better
- Oftentimes, and notably in times of change, simpler is better. Forms, for example, are neat; however, they require learning to use them. Sometimes a specific explanation is more understandable than a general explanation.
- Thought is worthwhile
- The thought that goes into designing a page to be easy to use is repaid every time the page is used.
- Heavy thinking is not the solution
- Most ideas for simplifying things is not gotten via the smoke-filled think-tank approach.
- People have opinions, finding opinions is not the problem!
- Getting people to see the benefit of the chosen course of action can be worthwhile.
- Go the second mile!
- Kenneth Blanchard, the author of One
Minute Manager wrote a book called
Raving Fans, and his basic advice was
- Get your vision
- Get the customer's vision
- Modify your vision
- Provide the vision + 1%
- It may pay to rethink the general subject-oriented presentation of library information.
- Subject searching requires knowledge of a chosen vocabulary and it emphasizes hierarchies and classification that is not inherent in the actual material. At the same time, even children know where the aisle for toys is, so orderly presentation is effective. It should be possible to present subject information graphically. I hope that the relation between subjects can be easily presented.
- Sometimes presenting information in as direct a manner as "What do you want?" saves time, space, and thought for everyone.
- Scholarly design may not serve day-to-day customers. Yale responds to the statement "I want to find a book." That is probably a more cordial phrase than "What do you want?"
- Consider the limitations of the introductory image-map graphic.
- It's possible to get into a situation where supporting the graphic is the focus of development rather than adding content, meaning, or usefulness.
- Graphic tools
- There is probably a benefit to getting commercial graphics tools. It is possible to create usable gifs from Windows Paintbrush, Lview and giftrans; however, Paintbrush doesn't provide for drawing in 256 colors. Lview is part of the tamunet winsock applications package generally distributed through the library and is very useful in translating Paintbrush bitmap files (*.bmp) to gif files that WWW browsers use. There's a MacIntosh program called DeBabelizer that coordinates the color use of a collection of pictures.
- Unix is secure
- There are some benefits such as security, maintenance, higher power, and state-of-the-art options that are possible through using Unix systems.
- WWW Development Style Guide
- If we decide specific guidelines for future Library WWW development, it will make it easier to gather together other people's work.
- Have a "developer's view" in designing the WWW system and provide the public with that view.
- For example, if the system was designed to be optimally used as icon-based, then say that, so that people will know the system experts recommend that the system be used. To be more specific, if considerable technical planning goes into the creation of a system that is not completely easy to use, the knowledge of how to use the system should be available from the designers. They had a plan in mind when they built the system. That plan should be provided to users.
- It's possible that we might want to begin using local newsgroups more for communicating with the academic community, including the request for their comments.
tamu.electronic.library.resourcesandtamu.generalandtamu.wwware some newsgroups to consider.- "Everything's changin'"
- Many things are changing as available information increases