1. Not an accumulation of facts

    Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure. The hypertext books that have gained popularity (I’m thinking here of Meaningness.com) have largely conformed to this in two ways: 1) there is an intended reading order, and 2) the longer essays within the project do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imparting the author’s perspective to readers.

    On the other hand, the notion of the “document” that is intrinsic to web development today is overdetermined by the legacy of print media. The web document is a static, finished artifact that does not bring in dynamic data. This is strange because it lives on a medium that is alive, networked, and dynamic, a medium which we increasingly understand more as a space than a thing.

    For a while now I've been calling categories of information on this website 'spaces'.

  2. More that can be done

    The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:

    Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.

  3. Open Transclude

    Screenshot of subpixel.space on 2020-04-17 at 10.21.19 AM.png

    What you are looking at is an scroll-locked iframe that links to a quote I picked out of my blog post “Notes on Comparative Psychology.” You can use Open Transclude anywhere you can drop an <a> tag on your own site.

    Open Transclude:

    • Works anywhere on your own domain
    • Compatible with most static site generators / templating engines
    • 12 lines of HTML, 80 lines of SCSS, 22 lines of JS (4.5 kb total)
    • Has 0 dependencies — this is native web technology

    Open Transclude is extremely simple, and the heaviest part of the code is the CSS, which you can simplify at your whim. That’s why I am referring to it as a UX pattern. This is not a protocol. The code is really a commodity. What’s interesting about it is the idea and the design, and this is just one viable implementation! Feel free to adapt it however you like.

    The principal improvement over a block quotation is sense of context.