like gWarming
and vshort
and aCock (for Alexander Cockburn)
are admittedly-borderline experiments
in a broader campaign
that might be called 'view scaling'
an illustration:
an online teevee schedule
is a 'view' of a database of shows
with fields for plot-summary
actors, year-made, etc
and in the 'now showing' over-view
you get very-abbreviated entries
for each of the many channels
but you can click on any individual show
to see the full database entry
so an abbreviated movie blurb that appears baffling
becomes clear when you see
in the expanded view
that the first-named actor is jackie chan
that it's a jackie chan movie
is the critical bit of info
but the database drudges
had to put that critical bit in the
normally-secondary
'actors' field
so the abbreviated listing
which omits the actors
favoring instead the plot-blurbs
left out the critical bit
sometimes it's the director that's critical
a bergman film
a woody allen film
or the school
a dogma95 film
or french new wave
and this stubbornly human
database-intractability
is universal
we can never say in advance
that one database field will always be
the most important to feature
when only one field can be displayed
and i'll call this the 'view scaling' problem
when you need to cram
five pounds of data-sugar
into a four-pound screen-canvas sack
something's gotta give
and you want the least-important pound
to give first
but often you want this trimming
to happen under robot-control
so databases need a custom-set importance-flag
on each field
to optimize the trimming
and further
as views dwindle down to a precious few characters
you need ways to trim the phat
from individual words
so 'very xxx' becomes vxxx
and jennifer lopez becomes jLo
