Active Tioga Documents: an Exploration of Two Paradigms

SUMMARY The advent of electronic media has changed the way we think about documents. Documents with illustrations, spreadsheets, and mathematical formulae have become commonplace, but documents with active components have been rare. This paper focuses on our extensions to the Tioga editor to support two very different styles of active documents. One paradigm involves dynamically computing, or at least transforming, the contents of a document as it is displayed. A second paradigm uses notifications of edits to a document to trigger activities. Document activities can include database queries, which are evaluated and placed in the document upon opening the document, or constraints between portions of a document, which are maintained as the user edits the document. The resulting active documents can be viewed, edited, filed, and mailed in the same way as regular documents, while retaining their activities.