Viewers, Players and Naked Objects

1. A viewer is something that takes information of any sort, and generates a physical type of information. For example, a text viewer would take information of letters, and convert it into a 2d graphics. A text to speech viewer would take information of letters, and convert it into a 1+1d sound. Alone, this idea is pretty stupid, but if you include it with the concept of metaviewers, that are placed to view structure, and then structure other viewers physically. An example of a metaviewer is a windowing system, like X windows which take sound and puts it into a 2d structure, or a sound mixer, that takes sound and then puts it in a time structure. Other prominent examples include classes, list/array, tree, other data structures.
   
2. Video players, such as windows media player, vlc player, video-lan players are all great examples of viewers, because these programs do not do the playing. Instead, the playing is moved out of the program itself into the codecs. This makes it a flexible system, where new file formats are able to be accepted. Also, the use of containter formats makes this system even more flexible, as the containers can support interleaving, various codecs, various meta-data that is possibly orthogonal (techies love this word) to the main intent of the information. [These concepts of containter formats could be supported by either a in-file juxtaposition.....]
   
3. the naked object approach is when you can directly access information via editing a direct representation of the object on the screen. This can be seen as a simplified version of the
   viewer approach.