Ginko: tree-shaped organization of text

An interesting perspective on document organization: hierarchical, two-dimensional organization of text into successive layers of detail. I kinda like it.

Ginko.

Editing text

A computer science view of distributed editing of text.  I need to reread it.

Time for a link dump

I've been sick, and the interesting tabs are piling up in my browser.  The problem is that the browser in question is on my 7-year-old XP laptop, and frankly, its CPU fan is starting to bug me.  So before I go to bed, link dump time!

• jQuery file upload demo.  OK, I know, but I'm a sucker for this stuff.
• Zac Stewart weighs in with an interesting proposal to use the HTTP OPTIONS verb for API self-description.
• Mojolicious boilerplate.  You had me at "boilerplate".
• Building world-class ML systems, an article at the O'Reilly Radar that I haven't even had time to read.  By the way, the complaints about NLP systems usually failing when normal mortals try to use them (OK, maybe I'm slanting that a little in paraphrase) is because current NLP systems aren't actually intelligent, but people don't have the mental tools to understand that.
• wkhtmltopdf - heck of a name for a tool that uses WebKit to render an HTML page to PDF.
• Diagram.ly - I'm pretty sure I've linked them before.  But still.  Here they are again.
• First in a series listing the tools for modern Web development.
• Nice post mortem on a virus infiltration.  I'm a sucker for that stuff, too.
• My cousin Erin's old blog has a post on responsive prototyping that's pretty slick.
• (See how I name-dropped there, but only for the really hip?  That's just how I roll.)
• Clearly.pl, a programmable structured text editor in Javascript. [github]
• generic-ci, a generic continuous integration tool that doesn't pull in all of Java.
• Cheap hosting page.

Thoughts on rich text

There are lots of ways to encode formatting and semantic information concisely in text. (The "concisely" is what I'm going to address here.) They include things like Markdown, ReStructured Text, Text::Multi (a more generic Markdown-like framework), Markdent (another interesting parsing framework), and of course markup like HTML/SGML/XML, RTF, and TeX.

The end purpose of all these text formatting languages is to provide a way to type regular text and have it formatted or typeset. I've been using something like Markdown in my pseudocoding so far, but I need to think things through in a principled manner, and essentially, what I've come up with is this.

First, the target. The target is formatted text, but what does that mean? Clearly, it means something with a series of nodes specifying format in a generic manner:

container
 paragraph
   text
     This is an
   italic
     text
       example
   text
     text.
 paragraph
   text
     It consists of two paragraphs, one of which contains italics.

Obviously, I'd rather type this:

text
 This is an {\i example} text.

 It consists of two paragraphs.

Now note that in this example I've used an RTF-like curly-bracket-and-backslash style, and I've used a convention that a blank line represents a paragraph break, the latter being more or less universal in Wiki and Markdown settings these days.

So what I want to do for the text node - and this will end up being used throughout Class::Declarative, mind you - is to provide a basic framework for rich text that will allow the user to specify parsers to turn any textual formatting language into nodal structure, then to include a few simple parsers (e.g. Markdown and RTF-like) that can be selected in some way.

A thought on code organization

Well, it's a pretty thin thought. Mostly this: These Actionscript examples I'm looking at tonight instead of doing the paying work are a freaking mess. They build stuff, and move stuff, and do all sorts of things in messy imperative ways. Now, obviously I can't write Declarative for Actionscript - but I could write a sort of front-end that would compile to Actionscript.

But if I do that, then, then, well then I've written a front-end that could compile to anything. A sort of Code::Declarative, if you will. And I'm not at all sure I truly understand what that would look like, although to a certain extent it's obviously what this entire venture is fumbling towards.

So maybe I should spend a little thought on just what it means to compile to a text file. I mean, structured text is not such an outré concept.

It's really a macro system again. I wish I could implement just one version of a macro system so I could see how many ways it fails.