LinkBack Project
I just ran across mention of a new Mac project called LinkBack, which seems to be an effort by developers like Nisus and Omnigroup to provide something like OLE in Cocoa. I sent roughly the following to the contact address:
Instead of repeating the same thing we saw 15 years ago, why not solve the real problem: data interoperability?
XML is an excellent tool to do this, and should be at heart of Linkback.
As a user, I really don’t want to be dependent on other applications to edit embedded data. I want that data to be open.
Omni has done some fantastic things with XML and integrated XSLT processing in OmniOutliner 3 (something which they ought to better promote). This is exactly the sort of approach that needs to be globalized throughout the OS.
So here’s a use case that LinkBack (or better yet, Apple) should enable:
I start writing in OO, dropping in citations as I go. These citations get automatically rendered with a system-level service.
I then open the document in Nisus Writer, with ALL of the logic intact. If I want to change citation styles, I should be able to do this with a flick of a switch, and without modifying any document source. Because citations are richly encoded in XML, this is easy.
… and so on.
I think you miss the point and beauty of LinkBack. Sure it would be cool to use XML as the way to store the content of the document. Something which will likely get much easier when CoreData arrives with Tiger. However, this has nothing to do with what LinkBack does. It gives you the abillity to edit any data from anyother LinkBack enabled application. Nisus Writer is a text-editor, why should they bother about implementing drawing code. They only display the resulting pdf. OmniGraffle is much more suited to handle the drawing.
I have been thinking about how this could work with citations, but the problem I see now is that there is currently no way to see where in the document a citation is pasted. I am not a big fan of Nisus Writer anyway, so I don’t think I’d bother too much. Now if only Apple would add (or through some kind of 3-rd party plugin) this LinkBack functionality was added to Pages. I’ve heard someone already has a working plugin for KeyNote btw.