I absolutely loved reading this discourse.
The idea that we could somehow describe content differently is fascinating.
I had a long conversation about computers with my mother the other day. She is currently 70 years old and claims to have no understanding of computers or design patterns.
We took a piece of paper and wrote down some content. It was a few sentences and a few bullet points. I explained:
so - the computer just sees a string of characters. You know what the weight and level of importance of each of these pieces of content are - but the computer does not. How can we get some shared understanding going between you?
She was very frustrated but I just kept prompting her. I told her that the computer can read the letters - and that we can make some rules. After a few minutes - she was exasperated. She did not enjoy this challenge - and she just said:
Well… just put an x in front of it…
(meaning that the x would declare that the first sentence was of level 1 importance.)
I said that was a great idea… but what about the second sentence? She said - that it was just a paragraph - so, it could be the default. “The computer should be able to know if it doesn’t have an x… then it’s just a paragraph, right?” I said, sure. But what about that other heading. That looks like a section heading - that might be in an essay.
Well, just put 2 x’s for that. It can be the 2nd most important.
So, - in about 10 minutes - my mom had basically described her own frustrated version of markdown with x
instead of #
I’m excited to think about other options to HTML / but I’m also not really sure how to even start.
There is some content. We ‘mark’ it - so - that we can reference it — and then we write(declare) a bunch of rules - and apply styles based on those markers… - and even my mom ends up with this same idea.
HTML(DOM), CSS, and OO programing styles - all just end up as groups of key:value pairs.
node-1
content='Title thing'
.thing {
color: red;
}
const thing = {
amount: 3,
};
Regarding this proposal - I’d love to see an example of another way we could describe content for the web. Are there any experiments or examples?