MonDoc is a FREE, easy-to-use, scalable editor for cognitively accessible documents (redundant hypertext), written in JavaScript (with parts in perl). That is, with this tool you can write better Web areas (which can be also used off-line), right into your everyday Web browser.
Why use MonDoc?
Because it allows a more cognitively accessible communication of thought than any other tool presently available (if someone thinks this is incorrect, please tell me of other similar existing tools; I would be glad to include here references to them). Check this out:
We can recognise a scientific paper by its stiff-collared, verbose style. It's not that (most) scientists like to express themselves in difficult ways, but because they try to express exhaustively the intricate concepts they are describing. It is the forced linearity of printed matter which makes materials difficult to read out of intricate, but simple concepts. MonDoc is here to try to correct this fact.
- Thought is what we try to convey, to document so others can verify; fortunately for thinkers and unfortunately for speakers, ideas are related to each other in complex webs of meanings, relationships, sources, probabilities (to name only a few ways); it takes Art (rhetorics) to successfully comunicate even relatively simple thoughts.
- Speech is linear and a very difficult medium for geting across the structure of ideas described above, naturally n-dimensional.
- The printed medium. Books, articles, papers and so on, allow for a more coherent presentation, but because just like speech, they are intrinsically serial, the graph-like dynamical aspect of thought is simulated by using hierarchies of sections (book, volume, chapter, paragraph, line, etc), references (both internal and external), footnotes, parantheses, abbreviations, etc.
- Specialized software: help engines, authorware editors, help-desk solutions and research on natural language interpretation and novel human-computer interaction principles (e.g. mnemonic gesture interpreters) are all attempting to find and harness cognitive principles which would make communication through computer-supported media closer to the thinking processes, faster and more accurate.
- The Web is a very dynamic part of the Internet. Until now it is the medium with the greatest potential for efficient conveyance of thought; unfortunately, the majority of existing Web sites overcrowd the visual field and the short-term memory of users and use the helpful features of hypertext in a divergent way, prompting the user to skip from one topic to another instead of converging their attention on the ideas presented on specific pages.
In writing MonDoc, I tried to combine - intuitive writing of plain text,
- a reduced number of text formating (highlighting, titles, quotes, etc.),
- the hyper-links familiar from the printed medium (see above),
- some hyper-links developed for the Web and
- activity-tracking (a way for the writer of a document to help the reader keep focused).
For more information, see my Master's Thesis.
Uses
Anywhere there is need for clear, compact and well-contextualized documentation, MonDoc can do wonders:
- Web-area editing
- Product documentation
- Tutorials (writing Windows Help emulations is a snap)
- Help desk applications
- Research (see MoStaCon, an application of MonDoc)
- Quickly organizing odd bits of information
- Small databases (see my collection of quotes - soon to come)
- Writing adventure games and interactive fiction
What it does
- a whole web area in one file
- less disk clutter,
- less slack,
- frees up the server by moving large amounts of processing to the client (browser),
- less time lost waiting,
- no interuptions while reading;
- cleaner structure gathered by the web spiders (search engines, self-updating link collections, etc.)
- hassle-free DHTML editing
- for beginners, medium and advanced users
- page template editing
- tags available in pop-down lists
- instant, totally accurate WYSIWYG preview :)
- built-in tag library editor
- pop-up glossary definitions
- context preservation with consistent page structure
- n-dimensional topic expansion (recursive pop-up explanations)
- programmable page features and actions
- semi-automated link tracking (doesn't allow you to write links that go nowhere, purges obsolete links)
- use replacement bits to
- avoid retyping same thing several times,
- organize the document and
- save disk space
- context-dependent help, integrated in the document
- easy document modification
- converters to and from txt and rtf (with user-controlled or automatic graph traversal)
- FREE for everyone to use
Size
No more tens of megabytes of web-editor software; the whole MonDoc editor, plus its filters and utilities is under 1M in size, from which 800k in images and tutorial animations.
Likewise, the documents it generates are very small; the larger the document the smaller the MonDoc file in raport with the equivalent traditional DHTML web area (calculated for v0.03 under 10% for the .html of an 8-page document with its navigation pages!! Beats the crappies outta Info-Zip compression used in WinZip et.al. ;) It's funny (at least for me) that I adapted the algorythm which I used in my first authorware program (Stylus: I wrote that in highschool, in Z80 Assembler and ZXSpectrum Basic)
Version information
My document editor (MonDoc) is still in alpha testing - not yet released for the world to play with. It'll stay that way until I find the time to deal with Netscape compatibility (or until they agree with Microsoft on layer definition.) Version notes are in chronological order cos' it makes more sense:
MonDoc started as a souped-down version of my HYMNS Web editing tool, so it inherited from there the page-development interface:
- driven with pop-down menus
- plain text editing right in the browser
- instant WYSIWYG preview
v0.01
- moved page generation from perl to JavaScript (MS JScript, to be precise)
- added window-spawning
- reworked window-spawning as standard (cos' the dratted document.clear() function doesn't work)
- diversified 'chunks' into glossary entries and replacement bits
- rudimentary compression (I need more TIME!!!)
- simplified template generation
- page-dependent clock (well, for now it's only a seconds-counter :)
v0.02 additions
- tracing (for debugging functions)
- action queue (to deal with setTimeout() overlaps)
- support for recursive notes
Similar available tools
- MetaDoc (Boyle and Encarnacion)
- InterBook (Carnegie-Mellon University)