The Plan for Alpha Zen

Currently we have a pre-alpha Zen. It has some capabilities that a complete demonstration version (Alpha Zen) should have. We need a plan to develop the pre-alpha Zen to the Alpha Zen. This is it.

Here are the salient points about Alpha Zen:

1. When Alpha Zen is released, Mashweb.Club will host it and be completely revamped. At the same time, the white paper will be moved into this Guide, which will be released along with Alpha Zen. Code from web-call.cc will be cherry-picked and installed on Mashweb.Club. Prior to the release of Alpha Zen, web-call.cc will be for experimenting and providing early glimpses of the Zen framework.

2. Poor, innocent nontechnical visitors will be the target audience of the homepage and a section of Mashweb.Club. A section of Mashweb.Club with a target audience of programmers will be clearly marked "Advanced". The purpose of Mashweb.Club will be to inspire interest in using and further developing the Zen framework.

3. Mashweb.Club will allow a visitor to create web pages using any of the most common responsive web design patterns (also called multi-device layout patterns). See Responsive Web Design Patterns on developers.google.com, (bit.ly/web-design-patterns). These pages will not be based upon templates. The DOM structure of the page will be live edited, then persisted (only for registered users). This editing will be described in a separate team discussion here.

4. A registered user will be able to upload a Scheme file with DOM and JavaScript extensions and run it inside the web page he creates.

5. A visitor will be able to create very simple web apps using a visual program editor. See the barely begun web-call.cc subproject (web-call.cc Demo #3: Zen visual program editor.

6. Using the HTML5 Drag and Drop API, a visitor will be able to drag and drop text and other types of data from outside the web browser into a Zen web page.

7. Using the HTML5 Asynchronous Clipboard API, a visitor will be able to copy text and other types of data from outside the web browser into a Zen web page.

8. A registered user will be able to persist any of his Zen web pages.

There are many important details to the DOM editing (point #3), covered separately in Part 4: Web Page Structure.