Comment by mgualt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgualt | Hacker News Reader

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I'm certainly drawn to the idea and am inclined positively towards it. I'm even willing to overlook the ridiculous hubris of "This new medium will be the way most text is read and written in the future."

However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points:

1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format.

2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer?

3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed?

I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot.

The hubris of the statement is not lost on me, but what should a founder be but delusional and optimistic :)

1. It's both a viewer and a word processor. It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it.

2. The structure of the document is an "outline of index cards". Each card can have one or more children. Source content (in markdown) is edited by toggling edit mode on that card.

3. Yes, we are extracting parts of this as open-source. The rest remains proprietary (for now, at least).

> I apologize if any of the above seems harsh

No need to apologize. Thoughtful criticism is what we need.

Thanks!

> It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it.

Do we need a new standard for structured documents? Would a <section> not be sufficient?

For three levels deep, no we don't need a new standard. Larger trees, linked together will probably need something new.

Larger trees are fine with <section>, and linking together is already defined with <a>.

Why does it matter how many levels there are?

He's probably talking about many-to-many relationships that he has planned.

Hi Adrioano,

I've been working on a relatively similar, but much larger and very complex project (AI/Maths) for some years now. It makes me really happy to see people coming up with the vision of a "hypertext" perspective shift.

Do you mind explaining why your surname is Ferrari?

"Hypertext" perspective shift... I like that. What's your project called? Can I see it?

PS: My ancestry goes: Italian > Argentinian > born in Kuwait > living in Canada. "Ferrari" means iron-worker in Italian, so it's not a rare surname in Italy.

Check your mail (I'll probably land in your spam folder).

PS: Very interesting ancestry, wish I had more knowledge into my own. It led me to think that you might be related to the Ferrari Company somehow.

Check your mail.

PS: Very interesting ancestry, wish I had more knowledge into my own. It led me to think that you might be related to the Ferrari Company somehow.

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