Tuesday, January 1, 2013

New Project: Parallel Markup

Dear Fellow Inventors,

Elliot and I have decided to postpone working on the Fresnel lens until warmer, sunnier weather here in Austin.

In the meantime, I intend to create a new project, which I call "Sparmark", a human readable system for parallel markup.

Parallel markup is the idea of NOT modifying a document with markup but rather creating a separate, parallel document to hold markup which essentially represents a transformation of the original document.  When I studied this field some years ago, the research for it was not terribly advanced, and I thought it was a field in which amateurs such as ourselves could make a significant contribution.

I believe Ted Nelson has been the biggest contributor to this field with his idea of Transclusion.  I found this paper: Embedded Markup Considered Harmful http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html to be a particular compelling and cogent expression of the problem.

In this post on New Year's Day I can't put down all of my ideas about this, but here is a summary:

  • I think we should create an open-source project to create parallel markup standards and software tools that will make transclusion much easier.  I imagine Python to be a language particularly well-suited to this, although I have never used it. (My previous work on this was in LISP.)
  • We must focus on creating a forgiving and human-editable markup.  In particular, I intend to draw inspiration from the markup that human copy editors do with a pencil.  The fact that we must deal with electronic texts should not prevent us from learning from the analog standards that copy editors have developed over decades.  XML is a terrible failure because it focused on software tools rather than human use.
  • I'm going to go out on a limb and try to create some videos and other things to recruit others to be involved in this project.  This log is very lightly read.  I don't seem to be very good at affecting my fellow workers, but I intend to continue working on it.
Please contact me if you would like to help create a team to work on this project.


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