My first thought was "this is pretty cool!" but wondering who actually needs it. I then had the realization that this is, in fact, a very different way of data expression. It would force you to think not only about what you are saying, but how you are saying it and how to demonstrate the ideas within the text of the document itself and not simply say "Refer to fig 1.1". This could truly present a new way of displaying data on the web. It could bridge the gap between complex animations and simple text. 99.9% of all sites I see that contain some cool animation are completely independent of the content surrounding them. Having the content and interactions married together in a simple way is really something I've not seen too often. Kudos.
Another cool experiment with the graph example given there: <a href="http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/</a> — go down to the guitar icon (or find "incidentally" on the page).
It's interesting (for me, anyway) to contrast this with Wolfram's Computable Document Format (CDF, see <a href="http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/</a> ).<p>CDF documents can only be written using Mathematica, are only playable using a special CDF Player (or Mathematica), and you have to license CDF for commercial use. Tangle is free and open source (under an MIT License), JS is "playable" in most web browsers, and JS can be written using any text editor.
This is one of the ideas I'm working on integrating into my toy data/programming language, Fern. <a href="https://github.com/andrewf/fern" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andrewf/fern</a>. It's not apparent from the README, but if you modify a Fern structure in memory, all dependent values will (should) be updated, even with name references pointing back up the hierarchy of data structures. These are mostly lists and maps (which define names for subsidiary structures), which can be generated by constructs like conditionals, functions, and (someday) loops.<p>Besides the ideas I listed, I see it being used in scenarios where you have formulas based on a few inputs, and want to see what the output looks like when you mess with stuff, like physical dimensions in a design or financial stuff.<p>It's nice to have a real term for this sort of thing in "reactive document" or "reactive programming" or what have you. Not so nice to realize my idea isn't unique and brilliant. :)
The graph is neat...I worry that the link is a UI paradigm that my mom or dad simply wouldn't grok though...I'm not a particularly good son and I don't talk to them much...so does anyone wanna test my theory out?
This is a specific document use of reactive programming, a paradigm where values are automatically updated when their dependencies change. Flapjax has offered reactive javascript for a long time now: <a href="http://www.flapjax-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flapjax-lang.org/</a><p>I think Flapjax didn't gain much traction largely because the website is ugly. Of course the the other reason is that regular event binding tends to be a good enough solution.<p>Some of the new client-side javascript solutions like knockout.js also offer reactive capabilities.
Take a peek at all of the author's projects [1]. It's amazing, humbling, depressing...<p>[1] <a href="http://worrydream.com/" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/</a>
have I been missing something or this brakes every accessibility rules? how can I "slide" without a mouse? It seems I can't even tab to the sliding enabled elements.
If you like explanations like these, maybe you'll like the live explanation of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform that I wrote a few years back: <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/bwt.html" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/bwt.html</a><p>I keep meaning to put it on the back of a better library so that it doesn't hang up the page if you type a too-long string.
I immediately find this useful. An app I am working on for a client allows for the preparation, setup and intake of candidate interviewees. The app has a few tools that help the administrator predict how many stations or interviewers will be required based on other parameters, like time it will take to conduct the interview process.
Impressive. It would be really neat if you could tie a variable to an external input (say, a WebSocket connection retrieving real-time data). Is the only way to adjust values user input, or could I do something more complex where real-time data is coming in and the document reacts to that as well?
Similar library from MS : RxJS:<p><a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11/HTM07" rel="nofollow">http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11/HTM07</a><p>It's available for the CLR as well:<p><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609</a>
Interesting: HN's duplicated post detection seems to be disabled (this was posted only 9 days ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101618" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101618</a>)
This wasn't really impressive to me until I started playing around with the dual pole filter. Awesome! Something like this should have been directly embedded in my prof's DSP lecture notes.
Nice, a dependency graph library for JavaScript. I wrote something similar for Clojure: <a href="https://github.com/gcv/dgraph" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gcv/dgraph</a>
This is absolutely brilliant for educational uses. Even the front-page filter example is something I plan to suggest to my prof for the DSP class he teaches.
It seems to me that this would be a good tool to use in an attempt at the following code challenge, where Wikipedia would like to see article changes and trends visualized. I saw their challenge yesterday, and made a note of it, but am too busy on other projects, so I'm just putting the idea out there. Why not make Wikipedia articles visually reactive?<p><a href="http://mediawiki.org/wiki/October_2011_Coding_Challenge/Real-Time" rel="nofollow">http://mediawiki.org/wiki/October_2011_Coding_Challenge/Real...</a>
This could be really useful in an app that helps people control their finances (Register a product/service and then slide the quantity and price... and if you integrate it with wallmart products/price -or something like that- i think it would be one hell of an app)<p>edit: typo