User:Ailepet/Web design notes

The following are miscellaneous notes about web publishing principles to adopt before thinking of how to approach web publishing practically

The three main families of read-only digital text

Text is usually read in one of the following formats:

• paper: books, zines...
• page directly retrieved from an ad-hoc online protocol: WWW, Gemini, Gopher, emails
• page of a self-containing file: PDF, epub

If we're thinking of these formats as text to be read rather than edited, all of those formats could be crafted from one of three categories of digital text files:

• files made to be printed into paper; e.g. PDF
• files made to be read on an local-first, often-offline, sometimes black-and-white-only device; e.g. ePub
• files made to be read on an online browser, through a 9:16 or 16:9 color screen between 12 and 70 centimeters of diagonal; e.g. HTML/CSS

(do we need a 4th category for slideshows?)

The next question would be: how do we get to these 3 formats? Could it be possible that they can be authored all at once from a single source?

From the web to the print

todo

Distinguishing between writing and editing

https://ia.net/topics/markdown-and-the-slow-fade-of-the-formatting-fetish

Writing alone can be done in a notepad (paper and pen) or a bare-bones text editor (digital). Markdown allows to add a minimal amount of semantics and hypertext in a bare-bones digital writing tool.

Editing can either be made at the same time as writing, or in a later phase

Diagrams

Data flow: raw SVG

To sort

• https://smolweb.org/guidelines.html
• https://filiph.net/text/the-revenge-of-server-side-includes.html
• https://deuxfleurs.fr/
• https://radicalweb.design/