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Comment by xpe | Hacker News Reader

> Peritext is a novel rich-text CRDT algorithm. It can merge concurrent edits of rich text without losing the intended edits.

The page lost some foundational credibility with me by making this claim without immediately following it [1] with citations, clarifications, or caveats.

Why? Because "intention" is a very big tent. At the very least, the project would benefit by characterizing the mapping between intention and edits.

Perhaps this project's notion of intention could be summarized very compactly. Let's see what we find and share it here?

P.S. I'm feeling like philosophy, which clarifies so many concepts -- or at least explodes them by asking a bunch of specific questions -- is more and more relevant when it comes to designing computational systems. The idea of intention is so key to so many human interactions. It would be a travesty for computer scientists and software engineers to gloss over its impacts.

[1] Even a "lowly" superscript would do.

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The page here has a good overview of Peritext: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

It's a separate project from the leading academics in CRDTs. It does what is claimed.

In reading your comment, I don’t see the connection to my concerns about intent. This leaves open the question of “is it worth clicking?”

In this case it was, so thank you. Here is the quote:

> Before we can implement an algorithm to perform this automatic merge, we first need to define a clear model for user intent, and define the expected results when concurrent edits are merged. In this section we develop such a model through a series of examples.

I only go to the trouble of mentioning this to help remind people that it is a win-win to make a clear connection when commenting. In this case, simply saying “This link talks about intent in detail” would have worked.

Agreed, apologies for that.

In this case, and I'm not joking, my wife called me through as she had just put dinner was on the table, clearly that took priority. So I hit send before adding any more context or comment, which I would otherwise have done.

I'm pleased you clicked, that page is such a brilliant overview of CRDTs, rich text editing with them and capturing intent.

Thanks for pointing that out. I refined the text and added a bookmark to make the citation stand out.

Did I miss the bookmark?

Also, in terms of a text chance, I noticed this:

> It is capable of merging concurrent edits in rich text format while preserving users' intent as much as possible.

Saying “as much as possible” doesn’t address my concerns. It still leaves open the question of intent and what specifically that means.

The Peritext page has a whole section on intent. It would be nice to have one sentence pointing specifically to it.

Alright, I just added a link to the section of the original Peritext document related to preserving the author's intent: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/#preserving-the-author...

The specific definition of user intent in the context of concurrent rich text editing can't be clearly explained in a few words. it's best understood through specific examples. I've provided some examples in my brief introduction to Peritext.

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