User:Ailepet/Web design notes

From PrePostPrint

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 2 following mediums:

  • on paper: books, zines...
  • through a screen:
    • either by browsing an ad-hoc online protocol: WWW, Gemini, Gopher, emails
    • or by downloading a self-containing file: PDF, epub

Some people are proudly "paperless" and prefer reading on screens, either LED or e-ink. Other would rather favor print as the quintessential low-tech medium. Ideally, as writers, we want to express ourselves on both mediums.

If we're thinking of all of these deliverables as text to be read rather than edited, both paper and screen mediums could be adressed through 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?)

So, 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

We can 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 slightly further to the other side, there are multimedia websites. Those can play animated pictures (GIF or video), or sounds. They can still be static per se but they stop being digital text only: they require more complicated technology to be correctly output (a LED screen opposite to a e-ink slate; loudspeakers or jack output).
  • keeping going further to the other side, there are blogs, forums and social websites. Those can leverage syndication feeds, microformats and ActivityPub to connect with each other (see IndieWeb). They need an active internet connection and dynamic server-side content generation to work.
  • all the way to the other side, there are the fully interactive websites. Those can be bona fide apps. They require the most computational power on the user's device.

Let's draw a line between the static websites and everything else: we will focus here on static websites as both a deliverable and a suitable basis for the 2 other formats (PDF and epub).

Static websites as digital books

"Digital books should be the best books we’ve ever had" (Matthew Butterick)

Some examples:

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

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