I happen to think that HTML/XML notes were a potential boon to

* <<H6N.0647>> Mastodon, ÆGNUS, plain-text, ...permascrolls?

I happen to think that HTML/XML notes were a potential boon to
extensibility
(<http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/GS-microformats-notes.html>) in GNU
social and the OStatus fediverse at-large, though admittedly
challenged by the necessity of HTML code-sanitization on servers.
Nevertheless, that's presently out the window as HTML (posted via
AtomPub) notes do not seem to federate to Mastodon. If that issue is
not fixed – and I suspect this is not a high priority for Mastodon
devs who seem focused primarily on building a sort-of "Twitter+"
microblogging server and not a more general/extensible many-typed
pub/sub server – there's not much incentive to work on an
AtomPub/HTML-based GNU social client (that's you, ÆGNUS) when the
users of that client are, essentially, blocked from the far greater
Mastodon userbase.

So, since the mastodon seems now to be leading the menagerie (sorry,
ol' gnu), and it only supports plain-text notes (with attachments)
– it's time to start thinking about what we can do with plain-text
notes.

Extensibility via notational conventions:

The answer to "what can we do with plain-text notes?" is: we can do
anything. It might be ugly, or inconvenient, but all source code is
plain-text anyway, right? So it becomes a client developer's
challenge to devise, implement, and popularize applications based on
the exchange of plain-text notes.

We already have @-mentions, #-tags, !-groups (in GS, but not in
Mastodon), and, of course, the venerable URL. How else can we add to
this vocabulary of machine-readable notations in plain-text notes to
enable additional features in clients?

-----
There's a side point here: with regards to how ugly or opaque heavily
"coded" plain-text can be, it the effect of that on users – it
doesn't seem to matter! Millions and millions of Twitter users have,
without difficulty, become adept at parsing in an instant the heavily
coded messages all over that service; not just the '@' and '#'
symbols, but a huge number of abbreviations, contractions, and
initialisms that have sprung up out of necessity in the 140-character
world. This is a fascinating development in language and literacy,
and shows the wonderful flexibility in humans' ability to aquire and
create new language in the Internet Age.
-----

Tree-structure and manuscript authoring:

This is a different topic entirely. It's not about extensibility and
applications, but rather it's about writing.

I like plain-text. I like it a lot. It's a fundamental part of a
xanalogical text system, and as such it's a core element in my main
project, Alph (<http://alph.io>).

In xanalogical systems, we build documents from source texts, and
ideally those source texts are plain-text. Plain-text microblogs are
interesting to me as a source for transcluded text becuase:

Notes represent nodes in a graph – the conversation tree – and
additional nodes can be appended to the graph by multiple users.
Linked data is another core xanalogical concept – not just A-to-B
linking, but the manuipulation of graphs – and so this is
additionally interesting in relation to that (altho' the "links"
between notices are not xanalogical).

Regardless of the nits one might pick, there's something worth
exploring in OStatus microblogging as a writing tool. Imagine this:

You post a note which acts as the root node of a notepad/outline. You
post notes representing top-level headings as replies to the inital
post; then you continue to build an outline by replying under each
topic/heading in the tree.

Other users contribute. They annotate your notes.

(Of course, shit-disturbers will flame you and try to start pointless
arguments.)

Then you start to work on a draft. Maybe each post is a paragraph, or
a short section. What order do you post them in? It doesn't matter --
this is where you also start working xanalogically, to sequence the
various source texts. And all through the process you're posting
revisions, corrections, asides and annotations as replies to notes
– and so are other people.

GNU social, Qvitter, and Mastodon don't show conversations as trees
– but ÆGNUS does. And for this kind of usage, it could be a great
tool. This gives me things to consider for future development of both
ÆGNUS, and Alph.

--
Excerpted from:

PUBLIC NOTES (H)
http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H
©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <[email protected]>