Proxima Requirements

• Proxima will be designed as an open-architecture system with interface standards for communication with other components.
• A user of Proxima can only see presentations. To edit a document, the user edits a presentation of it. Of course, the source text of a document is also a presentation of the document, so it is always possible to edit the plain source. The user actions are translated into updates of the originating document.
• Proxima is a structure editor, but not of the (sometimes irritating) topdown kind. Rather, it allows in-order construction of a document.
• Proxima specializes itself for particular document structures; for example, when editing a text field it becomes a normal text editor. For objects with a rigid presentation, such as forms, the editor should likewise specialize to a forms editor. For immutable objects the editor is still a convenient browser.
• It is possible to plug in special purpose editors in Proxima. For example, we don't expect Proxima to be able to visually edit SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) documents at an early stage, so we want to be able to plug in one of the existing visual SVG editors. Thus Proxima can be seen as a collection of editors, one for each document structure.
• The editor supports the specification of global computations. Both presentations and computations are specified using the same attribute grammar like formalism.
• It should be possible to run Proxima in a distributed environment.

-- MartijnSchrage - 01 Jul 2008