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
Kinds of websites
Let's roughly sort websites on an axis:
- on one side, static websites, in the sense of: text and images that are displayed according to the wishes of its editor (the reader can, of course, alter it using the browser's tools, e.g. by disabling CSS). This is the simplest form of digital text served online: you can read it straight from your browser without downloading a specific file.
- going further to the other side, there are blogs, forums and social websites. Those can leverage microformats and ActivityPub to connect with each other.
- all the way to the other side, there are the fully interactive websites. Those can be bona fide apps.
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