Comment by pilgrim0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilgrim0 | Hacker News Reader

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> It is fairly trivial to create basic HTML files. SSG + MD have removed a lot of the remaining obstacles

These are advanced computer skills IMO

> It doesn't just magically "arise from the structure", as much as I wish it did. The web site is a clear example - the lack of understanding how humans consume info, and what helps/hinders, leads to odd boxes around each paragraph

I appreciate the criticism. It's impossible to please everyone in terms of design, and I think your antipathy towards this particular style agrees with the general premises.

Regarding if disposition arising from structure is desirable or not, I think it's a matter of culture and habit. The time and complexity savings for authoring and publishing afforded by this model, for me, satisfactorily offsets whatever could be said that it misses in the aesthetic or funcional department, which can always be patched and improved. The positive feedback I had from interested users, all of them tech-illiterate, is what gave me the confidence to pursue investing in the research, and also made me realize that my insecurities towards its acceptability, which stemmed from sentiments quite similar to what you put forth as criticism, were mere whims. As far as experience and perceptions can be trusted, I believe serial multimedia has been proved as a viable format.

> And hierarchies alone are insufficient.

Not disputing that. The fact the document model is hierarchical does not mean the document system has to be. In fact it was never planned to be. There are many mechanisms in place affording hypernavigation, down to the design of the in-memory representation. Just haven't been implemented for lack of resources.

> you're getting a very rough first draft, sorry :)

I'd love to hear more. Feel free to ping me anytime if this is a subject you find exciting to discuss!

> These are advanced computer skills IMO

To set up? Yes. Absolutely. But that's equivalent to asking users to install a filesystem before using the machine :) Past installation, it's "write text. It shall appear"

Nobody needs to hand-edit HTML any more. It has become, for better or worse, the assembly language of information design ;)

> The time and complexity savings for authoring and publishing afforded by this model, for me, satisfactorily offsets whatever could be said that it misses in the aesthetic or funcional department

I'm curious. Are you saying the boxes are helping you author/publish (in which case, please say more!), or am I wildly misunderstanding?

> As far as experience and perceptions can be trusted, I believe serial multimedia has been proved as a viable format.

Absolutely. But it doesn't create meaning by itself. It's merely a well-understood and simple way of organizing information. (I should've added "linear" to "tree" and "grid")

And just having a pre-defined structure doesn't give meaning in general. You'll need to conform to it, and you need to deal with the parts that just won't conform. (soft/hard links exist to satisfy a need, if we want to go back to file systems)

> I'd love to hear more. Feel free to ping me anytime if this is a subject you find exciting to discuss!

I just might take you up on that ;) The topic's near and dear to my heart. (Alas, it is not my main occupation, so... feel free to ping as well. I might fall off the face of the earth from time to time ;)

> Nobody needs to hand-edit HTML any more

Doesn't that prove it absolutely failed? I mean, you have to abstract it so much that, like you said, it's a compiler target at this point! That's precisely my reasoning when I said about needing a second system in the article. And, mind you, not only a second system, most of the time also a third or more! Might as well write a game engine with the budget needed for an HTML WYSIWYG editor.

> I'm curious. Are you saying the boxes are helping you author/publish (in which case, please say more!), or am I wildly misunderstanding?

Not the boxes, per se. I'm refering to the general approach of having independent elements that can be composed with no rigour or planning. This UI came out this way cause I ported the code for the data structure editor, which, for accessibility reasons, had a full-blown cursor around each element, that's why it retained the borders. It's obious that there should be a read mode with less clutter. But honestly, It does not worry me too much, for a proof of concept it was not worth to sweat every detail.

> And just having a pre-defined structure doesn't give meaning in general. You'll need to conform to it

Beautifully said. It's for precisely this fact (if you accept Peirce semiotics) that it becomes a cultural factor. You are compelled to think the way the medium demands you to think. And this is completely dystopian but also absolutely real, and serious! That's why design decisions in authoring interfaces are undeniably political. The abysm indeed looks back. One of the main reasons I started this research was to find a way to express myself in a more forgiving way, that better reflected my thought structure: loose. I can't bear the typewriter model, it drains all my energy and creativity, it smells of formalism and grandeur. Now, when I chat with people, my mind is free, I type at the speed of thought. So that influenced the whole design. I trust you can see it.

> Doesn't that prove it absolutely failed? I mean, you have to abstract it so much

I think they meant for absolute novices. HTML is still very very easy to learn if you need/want to write it by hand.

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