WYSIWYM for Notes

February 28, 2008 7:53 AM

I'm interested in designing a notetaking markup system for writing & the web. Before I put much more effort into it, does it exist?

I have an idea for something that goes in a different direction than most markup - instead of style, it essentially denotes substance. Something like

A Season in Purgatory <>wonderfully accessible worlds of LaTeX and formal semantics.

Any ideas? Remarks? Suggestions? Does this already exist, and I'm just not noticing it?

Thanks

posted by tmcw to writing & language (9 comments total)

Ah, crap, my example died.

A Season in Purgatory <>
- Talks about religious and political conflict in the 1980s
@ 1996 made into a movie
  Characters
    o Mr. Gerald
    o Harrison - a good young man

And later, I wrote...

I'm not sure if something like this already exists, since I'm not sure what to call it. I've seen a semantic extension to LaTeX, which combines the wonderfully accessible worlds of LaTex and Formal Semantics.

I think it could be useful, not only to immediately pick up on the meaning of notes - better than straight bullets or paragraph-style, but also if there's a machine implementation, you might be able to do simple things like extracting vocab terms and timelines from the text. Also, having objects clearly denoted could make it a very simple wiki-like system (minus the proliferation of separate pages)
posted by tmcw at 8:00 AM on February 28, 2008

Markdown?
Textile?
posted by Ikazuchi at 8:35 AM on February 28, 2008

stikkit.com analyzes your notes and tries to identify and relate things like people, places, dates, etc.
posted by breaks the guidelines? at 8:49 AM on February 28, 2008

@Ikazuchi - both denote style, and are targeted only towards HTML output?

Hmm, I like Stikkit's concept - I've used it before. I always thought that their implementation was pretty terrible, though. Maybe I'll just hope that they can improve it?
posted by tmcw at 9:03 AM on February 28, 2008

If you know some Formal Language Theory, or at least how to use yacc/lex, then the implementation will be a lot easier. You could write a lexer/parser to convert your markup into say LaTeX for example, then use all the tools available for that. (*Has a homework assignment due on converting pascal to C and back.*)
posted by philomathoholic at 9:22 AM on February 28, 2008

I think it's unfair to say existing simplified markup languages are focused on style. They're just shorthand for HTML, and HTML is not about style, it's about structure.

Now, it may be that HTML does not have the structural markup you want--it doesn't have special handling for dates, etc (although there are microformats to plug some of those gaps).

If you need that extra structure, I think it would make sense to take an existing markup language, like markdown, and amend it with your own custom shorthand tags, which would map to a microformat.
posted by adamrice at 9:28 AM on February 28, 2008

I'll agree with adamrice and state that if fine-grained control of the semantics of your document are of high importance, you can use XML to create a the markup and publish the schema or DTD for the document.
posted by Ikazuchi at 10:40 AM on February 28, 2008

Have you seen ConnectedText? It's a commercial personal wiki. I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for but, since it can be extended with scripts, it can probably come pretty close.
posted by BigSky at 10:40 AM on February 28, 2008

@adamrice: you're right - textile and markdown do more than just text formatting, but I'd say that is what they are used for most of the time. Some of the nicer semantic parts of HTML (for instance, definition lists) aren't supported by either, whereas their shortest syntax is devoted to underlining, emphasizing, and linking text.

@phil: good idea - that's part of my intent, to learn more about 'real' parsing and lexing.

@Ikazuchi - I might be misunderstanding the capabilities of what a DTD can do, but XML is the furthest thing from what I would want this to be. I'd like something that is writable, pen and paper, and that doesn't need machine translation to be understandable. YAML is almost there, for me, but it is made to map to existing programming language concepts, while I'd like to map to simple English knowledge structures.

Microformats could be a very good thing, though, for piecing out some of the machine work.
posted by tmcw at 10:55 AM on February 28, 2008