My architectural philosophy is: "I need to see it working
before I can design it". It sounds a bit backwards but it
actually works really well: first you hack together
something that does what was required or a small subset of
that. Then you look at what you did, how it was done and
what sorts of changes are necessary. Then you fix that
stuff, either throwing all of the first attempt away or
cutting and pasting pieces that are suitable for the second
version.
GZigZag is beginning to reach the end of the first stage in
some areas, and is even in the second stage in some
(ZZPersistentDimSpace file format). However, some things I
have not even begun the first stage yet on, like networking
and slices. Those will make life interesting in the future
;)
I keep thinking about how to make the first interesting
structural text demo. What structure etc. One thing I'd like
to do at some point but which may be a bit too difficult
right now is to take RFC822 (email&news message format),
which is long and needs to be read sequentially because of
definitions of the formats etc. and make that into REAL
hypertext. So that when you look at a definition, the
definitions required to understand it float nearby on the
screen, reduced in size and you can click and smoothly move
into one of them.