A WYSIWYG development environment has been designed and implemented for technical writers [since 1984]. This environment, called Concordia, is an extension of Genera [specifically, the Document Examiner (see 1987)], the software development environment provided on Symbolics Lisp machine computers.
It applies object-oriented techniques to creating, publishing, and maintaining complex documentation. Using this highly integrated working environment, writers move beyond conventional limits on their productivity.
The discussion covers the goals and design of Concordia, creating and editing documents, viewing and reviewing documents, and production. [Concordia supports transclusions, bookmarks, and code folding/outlining.]
The Concordia approach is evaluated.
[See also: 1985 video overview, video demonstration, “User’s Guide to Symbolics Concordia Book Design”, VM guide.]
…To find relevant sections, users have commands that let them do the on-line equivalent of looking in the index and table of contents for the document set. The set of interesting sections (called candidates) is listed in a menu at the top right of the screen. Candidates are mouse-sensitive, so a user can click directly on a name to read it or look at how it fits into the document set.
Müller-2002: …A click on any link does not immediately jump to the destination; instead the link is added to a list of candidates. Eventually a click on a link in the Candidates pane opens the document in the content area. This behavior has turned out to be useful in the application of online help, because users are looking for information and like to pre-select some topics that might solve their problems. The result of search operations is also displayed in the Candidates list.
[Somewhat like my musing about doing popups anchored to the side. Perhaps we could log all popped-up URLs and present the in-page reader browsing history as an appendix of transcludes, similar to the link-bibliographies?]
References to documents can also be saved as bookmarks—a concept also based on the book metaphor. A dedicated Bookmark pane holds the links for later use.
![Figure 5: Overview window visible in Document Examiner. The overview describes the topic, “Using Converse” [chat client]. The textual part of the overview shows the keywords associated with this record and the cross-references that it makes to other records. The diagrams show the local context for a record, in what section it appears, and what other sections are nearby in the document.](/doc/cs/lisp/1988-walker-figure5-overviewwindowindocumentexaminerforsymbolicschatclientconverse.jpg)