about outlining ...

Posted by jimspoon
Sep 21, 2011 at 04:57 AM

I used to think outlining (“physical” ordering of information items in a tree structure) to be an inferior method of organizing the items. Rather, I’ve thought that the definitive or ideal organization was the relational database model of tables, fields, values. In outlines, items are ordered arbitrarily according to a scheme that need not be thoroughly thought out. But now I think that the physical ordering of items is good. The database model depends on our skill in querying that database; and we may not be sure that we’ve retrieved all the items that we wanted, or that they are arranged in the way we want them. When we put items in an outline, however, we can be always retrieve those items, arranged just the way we placed them. Both methods can be employed in an outliner/PIM, though.

In this sense, I guess UR does have the essential feature of an outline - hierarchical arrangement of info items - even though the the tree is a tree of item titles, and not a tree of the items (e.g. text paragraphs) themselves. (The item content being placed in the “child items” grid pane and the editor pane.)

just thinking out loud.

jim