a document format that includes whens and who's and hows and wheres and timing (event stream document format) and editing environment that can playback and rewind
And what of: "Just print it out and archive it." ..?
How does THAT help? What's to guarantee that we'll still be using physical eyes to read documents in 60 years time?
Excellent write-up on the why's and wherefore's of COM. If there is one article to read to "get" COM, (and more generally, component software,) this would be it.
It's a paper about "dialog documents," which, I understand from the abstract, means documentation that includes connections to transcripts of the dialogs that led to the creation of the document itself. He talks about how this might be technically implementd, how a compiled document differs from a bunch of dialog (in terms of usefulness to people,) ...