Re:Dumbdown – A Tree Language that compiles to HTML
by breck on Monday September 02, 2019 @11:17AM
(#20859593)
We think alike!
> such that the resulting document could be directly narrated or dictated, without resorting to too many (if any) "special" words for punctuation.
This is a design test I put every new Tree Language through. The early languages still had some special punctuation, like # for comment. Once syntax highlighting and autocomplete was good, I realized we should do away with all such instances, in most cases. It's made them much more of a joy to use.
> Currently, screen-readers do not cope well with modern web pages, and can you imagine trying to dictate HTML to a speech-to-text based editor?
Agreed! I had a friend who is blind who I spent a couple days with years ago observing how he used his machine. It was both incredibly complicated and also amazing (I couldn't believe how fast he had the computer speak to him and how he was able to understand anything). I hadn't thought about that use case for Tree Notation languages until your comment just now. Thanks for sharing it. Perhaps there is something that could be done in that domain. Let me know if there are ways we could help.
> such that the resulting document could be directly narrated or dictated, without resorting to too many (if any) "special" words for punctuation.
This is a design test I put every new Tree Language through. The early languages still had some special punctuation, like # for comment. Once syntax highlighting and autocomplete was good, I realized we should do away with all such instances, in most cases. It's made them much more of a joy to use.
> Currently, screen-readers do not cope well with modern web pages, and can you imagine trying to dictate HTML to a speech-to-text based editor?
Agreed! I had a friend who is blind who I spent a couple days with years ago observing how he used his machine. It was both incredibly complicated and also amazing (I couldn't believe how fast he had the computer speak to him and how he was able to understand anything). I hadn't thought about that use case for Tree Notation languages until your comment just now. Thanks for sharing it. Perhaps there is something that could be done in that domain. Let me know if there are ways we could help.