Right now, most computer people still think of documents as independent and standing alone.  This is a naive stage of understanding, looking at individual pieces and not seeing the whole-- like the biology of two hundred years ago.

But many documents are intrinsically parallel.  This is where the hard document work lies, and what computers must be set up for.

To EXAMPLES.

Parallel versions.

My working definition of a document is this: a document is an arbitrary collection of versions having the same name (and possibly under control of the same owner), whose cross-connections and commonalities may be important.  These are parallel.

In addition, many documents travel together-- for instance, commentaries, which cannot even be considered without the documents which they comment on; or other documents implicitly connected, such as parodies and the original targets that they satirize.  These too are parallel.

The extreme case is a document with only one version-- with no variants, no alternatives, no history, no commentaries or other coupled documents.   This is the trivially-simple case for which today's trivial text systems have been designed.  And even though the large majority of documents may be like that-- alone and brotherless-- it is the more serious problem of multiple parallel versions that we must design for.

    Back to "My Parallel Universe"