[Attention conservation notice: Some incoherent ideas about using graphical instead of textual data for human-machine and machine-machine interaction in an OS.]
The outputs of many Unix commands follow the Microformats principle: Designed for humans first and machines second. Humans is a bit debatable in the Unix context, but still, the data is useful to the geeks among us, and also to scripts that process it.
ms@zulu:~/mov$ ls -lh
total 9.4G
-rw-r--r-- 1 ms ms 1.4G 2007-05-21 16:21 Akira.avi
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-26 10:48 Amarcord
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-02 11:24 Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-12 03:55 As Tears Go By
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-09 00:21 Blood Simple
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-11 02:44 Fallen Angels
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-04-30 15:23 Fishing with John
-rw-r--r-- 1 ms ms 701M 2007-05-20 16:19 Happy Together.avi
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-16 23:38 Kukushka
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-21 15:53 La Notte
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-13 13:39 L'Avventura
drwxr-xr-x 2 ms ms 4.0K 2007-05-23 12:16 L'Eclisse
This is micr*formatted data. (We have to say micr*formatted, or Tantek will sue us.)
The Mathematica folks are doing some seriously cool work extending a shell-like environment with graphics, and the the demos are amazing.
Can we make it so (and would it be useful) that the returned graphics are micr*formatted data that can be passed to another application?
think &
Perhaps markup the photos of people as hCards?
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
Posted by: Tantek Çelik | June 01, 2007 at 01:31
Yeah, this would work for this example, but for an OS you'd need something open-ended, like hCustomFields. :)
Posted by: Manuel | June 01, 2007 at 12:39