Thursday, September 4, 2008

Tufte on document-based platforms

This just posted at the end of a new thread on Ask E.T. about Google Chrome:

(Emphasis added by me)

"How's the browser?

Thanks to the many contributors who pointed out Scott's kind link in the example of amazon search.

David Pogue's report in The New York Times suggests this browser leads to an integrated platform with non-proprietary formats (very good) but is still application-based rather than document-based (not very good)."

-- Edward Tufte, September 3, 2008

This is something I think constantly about - document-based platforms can serve end-to-end needs from data extraction, transformation, portability, and visualization. See also, the flow on Document Driven Visualization