My recent proposal to work on modeling capabilities fell flat, but elicited some good discussion of future directions for Subtext. Peter Marks wrote: <\/p>\n
… I would rather see a complete re-examination of what lies underneath the World Wide Web. And then take the Subtext approach of banishing syntax, treating program as data, history, etc. … This would mean initially abandoning the UI demo and focusing more on the development of a system\/infrastructure that works with and within the Internet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Macneil Shonle wrote:<\/p>\n
I wonder what “Subtext on Rails” would look like? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Some thoughts:<\/p>\n
\n
- HTML\/XML is a tree. It would be useful to have a language based on trees…\n<\/li>\n
- HTML\/XML encodes a tree into a text string in a way that makes it awkward for both <\/strong>humans and computers. What if we treat the syntax as merely a serialization format? Give the programmer a tree-based UI, and give the program a tree-based semantics?\n<\/li>\n
- Templates suck. Every web programming language seems to be based on escaping code inside HTML. What a mess. You have to mentally juggle multiple syntaxes, multiple notions of context, multiple namespaces, multiple evaluation-times. What is needed is a uniform way to treat trees as both data and code at the same time…\n<\/li>\n
- The primary method of constructing HTML is copy & paste. Sometimes explicit inclusions are used. What is needed is a powerful and principled basis for copying and varying trees…\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I haven’t really thought this through – I am just throwing it out for discussion. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My recent proposal to work on modeling capabilities fell flat, but elicited some good discussion of future directions for Subtext. Peter Marks wrote: … I would rather see a complete re-examination of what lies underneath the World Wide Web. And then take the Subtext approach of banishing syntax, treating program as data, history, etc. … … <\/p>\n