Mad lib

We dumped a useless greeble of compute into the last post and it looked like a janky mad lib. Maybe simpler to say it looked like a state-of-the-art Web form in 1995. In most browsers, the transition from free text that you read to the kinds of document elements that you edit yourself is not smooth. It’s not even meant to be smooth. It’s supposed to be obvious which part I write and which part you write. I’m using the Ghost browser-based editor to write this post and I’m sure it took a great deal of tweaking to make this browser seem like an editor. There is even a blinking cursor! I’m sure I don’t want to know how that is implemented.

Once I press publish, the editor is gone and readers are left with WYSIWYG in the original sense. What you see is what you got. Take it or leave it. Is it possible to split the difference? Sure!

WorldWideWeb, the original web browser, had a super power. It was written for the NeXTStep system. This was the software that made NeXT workstations more than just handsome at rest. The NeXT display system, Display PostScript, made it was easy to put typographically thoughtful text on the screen and combine it with multimedia. The widget libraries built on this could make you believe that maybe it was possible to have nice things. WorldWideWeb, the browser, became the first WYSIWG content creation tool for the web almost by accident because the ’text’ widget used to display content was also the basic editor widget.

This feature somehow survived though little used. It’s supported with two html attributes that may be as old as the <blink> tag and older than the once-ubiquitous ’under construction’ animated gif.

Here is an example of first — ‘contenteditable’. Click it and you should be able to then delete the ‘90s ‘under construction‘ GIF and the blinking text. This isn’t HTML 5. This is HTML from before they had the sense to number them.

This is rendered with the blink tag. i hope your browser knows better than to make this actually blink!

Thanks to Wikimedia for the trip down the under-construction memory lane.

Yikes. Please do delete it. It's driving me crazy.

In the olden days before JavaScript and before the ability to inspect and manipulate the DOM programmatically, this ability to edit was of limited value. Some browsers may have let you save the edited version but today’s desktop Safari does not. It may have taken subsequent browsers more than 15 years to catch up with some of the interactive features that the original browser had, though that original had been long obsoleted in every other sense.

There is so much good alt-history fiction on television (and streaming in your browser) these days that there is little point here in hallucinating a web that may have been. I mean, there would be more Amigas obviously and I feel that "For All Mankind" missed the mark here.

The real web became asymmetric pretty quickly. Big companies serve it. You consume it. Medium-sized companies provide content tools for the people who edit it. Maybe the combination of big money and anti-trust scrutiny is the reason browsers remain just about the best and most ubiquitous multimedia applications ever created. Are they still useful otherwise? Are they useful standalone? Are they useful beyond today’s web?

I think so. I hope so! I think that browser-adjacent local compute is what makes the rest of that work. Oops. I wen’t straight from SOAP to soapbox. Back to stupid browser tricks. Would a particular social security number make you Grue bait? Click on the number and see.

You only get to edit the number in this case. I would like it more if you could edit the number, edit the code, and edit the document that combines them.

That's a basic read-eval-print loop, or REPL. It's about 1% of an interactive system but you can use it to build much of the rest. What happens when you drag the under construction image into the prompt box? What's the best way to turn that into a piece of Javascript syntax that can be evaluated? I don't know. Perhaps this REPL will evolve further. To do so, it probably needs a name. I'll call it Tigre and backronym it later to something like Text with Inline Graphics Read and Evaluated. Better still, let's try it on an e-ink device and call it Paper Tigre.