Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!mtxinu!alan
From: alan@mtxinu.COM (Alan Tobey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: What to do about > 32K of data?
Summary: Maybe for you...
Message-ID: <807@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: 27 Mar 89 20:33:44 GMT
References: <938@Portia.Stanford.EDU> <10520021@hpfcdc.HP.COM> <27803@apple.Apple.COM>
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Lines: 28

> Thank you for your concern, and as always, I was somewhat misunderstood.
> What I meant to get across is that different types of applications have
> different data models and are useful for different things.  Word
> processors are great for vast quantities of linear text, databases are
> great for record/field stuff, etc.  HyperCard is not a word processor or
> a database, although it does have elements of each of these standard
> applications.  HyperCard IS a hypertext application: something new.  All
> I wanted people to understand is that this model is fundamentally
> different than a word processing or database model.  Therefore the data
> is to be treated differently.  

Dan, I'm  sure that for YOU, and for the other developers of HyperCard,
"Hypercard is a hypertext application" is correct and complete.  But
for some of us that's a pretty narrow view.  For some of us, for
example, HyperCard is PRIMARILY "Macintosh programming for the rest
of us," and the fact that is IMPLEMENTED as a hypertext system is often
incidental.  Without HyperCard, there's NO WAY I could have produced any
of the dozens of personal Mac applications that I and my company use every
day.  Some of these applications USE the hypertext "features" (as I'd
prefer to describe them), some don't.  To FORCE HyperCard into being
ONLY a "hypertext application" is to ignore that it does some OTHER
things better than most other tools around.  As it seems to some of us,
arbitrarily crippling our use of the best tool we have (for example, by
limiting the amount of text we can handle in one bite) is both short-
sighted and unnecessary.  It's like telling a young girl that
she was conceived to grow up into a software engineer, so she shouldn't ever
bother with playing baseball (since we fixed her legs so she can't ever
run past second base!).