Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Announcing Ibid's Editor

Ibid's Editor is an editor for xanalogical text, which is, so to speak, hypertext on steroids.

Xanalogical text is based on the idea that text has an identity: that is, the word cat that I wrote just now is different from the same word that I write at some other time and also different from the same word as written by anybody else. Xanalogical systems assign identity to all content that is injected to it as it is injected; when the content is manipulated inside the system, that identity is preserved.

This pervasiveness of identity of all content can be and is exploited by a xanalogical system to identify reuse of content and to create deep, unbreakable links between two pieces of content. The first, content reuse, is called transclusion and the second is unsurprisngly enough called content linking.

Ibid's Editor implements both transclusions and content links. It does not implement versioning as of yet, although it is considered an important part of the xanalogical model. It will be added later.

Ibid's Editor also provides basic visualizations of transclusions and content links based on the idea of parallel documents. A more advanced visualization called transpointing windows is planned but not yet implemented.

2005-06-14T00:13+0300 - /en/programming

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Re: Announcing Ibid's Editor

What applications do you use that editor for?

- Josh, ti, 14 kesä 2005 19:06

Re: Announcing Ibid's Editor

Currently nothing, since it is not ready for production use. I have played with it mainly by reconstructing emails so that quotes become transclusions, but that's not a realistic application for production use. I hope it will be useful enough for writing all sorts of texts eventually. Texts that need the ability to quote from other texts will benefit, so scholarly writing is certainly one application.

- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, ke, 15 kesä 2005 10:47