Language-based editing systems have the potential to become a practical, central, and powerful part of every software engineer's toolkit, but progress has been limited by inattention to user-centered design issues. Major usability requirements for such systems include familiar, unrestricted text editing; coherent user interaction with software; rich, dynamic information display; multiple alternative views; uninterrupted service in the presence of ill-formedness, incompleteness, and inconsistency; description-driven support for multiple languages; and extensibility and customizability. Solutions require better understanding of software engineers and their tasks, appropriate design metaphors, new architectural organizations, and design for adaptation and extension.

Published as Springer Verlag LNCS 896, 1995.

17 Pages (pdf, ps)