- "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.
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oh. another point (which latex demonstrates well):
- most layout is word flow
- some layout sections must support more precise arrangement conditions
i'm not quite sure here, but:
- i would very much like to avoid the "latex problem" and the "css problem"
- where because some feature necessitates pixel precision, the entire language must support same
perhaps a "layout graph" could describe pluggable structure, with each such structure supported by each renderer
the layout graph is distinct from a realization: each layout graph instance by the user uses the same delimiters, as per realization
i feel it must be deeply arrogant to forgo the entire web ui model, but i don't think a written document and a software interface are at all the same thing!!!
i don't think it was wrong to try that out. but also, the web was (as a product, with hypertext) very much intended to replace text. word processors used to be designed for experts, and expensive—HOLD THAT THOUGHT! https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0720/072011.html
Yet there has come to be something human about typewriters. At least I am rather taken with the notion that Cummings, whose strange patterns of verse fairly fizz on the page, sat down to a foursquare upright like the one I was given by an old Marine Corps buddy from Maine. And that Plath called forth her dark muse on an almost playful little Hermes like the one I carried in my luggage for years.
this is incredible! each author—their own extension of arm and hand?
[voice wavering] what would it mean to have developed sylvia plath's preferred typewriter?
a typewriter is a very human machine. one wonders if cummings was encouraged to wander around the page because tab stops are essentially gundam power steering?
And suppose another Eugene O'Neill wrote another marathon Mourning Becomes Electra. Even if his wife had to type out six whole different versions, as Carlotta O'Neill complained that she did, there would not necessarily be any manuscript to tell the tale.
carlotta o'neill, i want you to know that i have heard you.
Those versions could all be invisibly stored on computer disks. Or one version could have been repeatedly modified without changing the whole thing each time, and only the final version might exist on disks.
i'm losing my fucking mind man
Something would be missing from the exhibition anyway. There would be no accompanying manuscripts with erasures, interlinings, and marginal notes to show the author at his craft.
erasures and interlinings might be fun artifacts, but to the author, they are noise. marginal notes though—metatextual notes to self—this is absolutely real
No swooping lines and arrows across the page tethered to James Joyce's handwritten second thoughts.
and today i find i am james joyce!
but here too the author romanticizes the static artifact of a stateful process. when i use lines and arrows, it is not driven by the direction of thought, but the remaining space on the page. such a manuscript page flattens out the order in which such thoughts occur. it may be likened to an artist's palette, in which the earlier colors lay below the finishing touches
the lines and arrows—they link the appropriate text range to the comment, so it can be read as intended, or expanded into thought bubbles. the arrow in fact serves as a decoupling. i'm confident that joyce's arrow was a metatextual marker
None of Samuel Johnson's more ornate hand as he wrote and scratched out lines for the preface to his celebrated Dictionary or improved the style of other authors' prose to illustrate proper usage.
linguistic prescriptivist? writing a dictionary? this is my surprised face
Now what kind of museum display would a disk make? ''On this disk are the last three revisions of Moby Dick.'' Would anyone believe it? Would there have to be a computer continually at work so that visitors could see the disk's contents on the screen?
the author of this piece rocks!!! now he seems to get closer: the computer must be at work, because it must display multiple distinct views (in this case, mutually exclusive states of some region). the manuscript of joyce uses the arrow construction to toggle comment visibility (using the brain and eye).
but what is this museum paradox? the museum, i now see, was a very clever analogy: by necessity, the static artifact serves as synechdoche for historical process
the case of moby-dick in the museum (cleverly) conflates two artifacts: that of moby-dick, and that of the computer and its software. these versions of moby-dick—they have names, and audiences. that is to say: the versions all together are coherent only in the context of a stateful editing process—i.e., in the mind of a specific user!
