- "hypertext" describes a set of UI conventions. linking to things is not new
- rendering static documents is distinct from interactive dynamic ones
- forms are static documents
- rendering documents is not remotely related to their mode of transmission.
Discussion
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URL format? make it completely opaque
static document rendering is not an internet problem, nor a programming problem. everyone in the world who writes has a stake. every format i know of is unspecified and ascii-centric.
i think org could work. not forked—from scratch. i think attribute containers are a good model for various affordances. that the document is readable without highlighting makes me feel that it could be empowering to write a document that will continue to parse the same years later.
"text" is problematic. but structure and layout are distinct. so:
- structural ontology: spanning, anchoring, containment, metadata
- an ASCII "realization" associates each structure to a grammar model with ASCII tokens
from this, we render:
- page splitting/wrapping
- order and visibility of sections
- fontification
so a renderer can be hooked up to a graphics device etc
@vtrlx is there a structured document format you like? i have been convincing myself above that "plain text" can be contextually meaningful, and that structure is distinct from realization.
html technically has a "structure", but it's only made available in the js dom. html is also a google product.
i want a text format because:
- the user has access to the whole document contents
- i do not know of any attempt to distinguish structure and realization like this—this is also how i want my programming language to work
contra html, static and dynamic behavior are not the same. jarek duda tried really hard to make a use for wolfram's plotting widget, but scientific figures are static because they represent specific data. i believe dynamic layout is a much harder problem and overlaps very little with document structure.
@hipsterelectron I've never bought into the idea that structure and layout are separable:
- page splitting is absolutely structural
- order of sections is structural (what would even justify reordering sections for display?)
- font selection (esp mono vs not) affects alignment, which affects semantics
@hipsterelectron zooko's triangle says "yip" imo.
