Apparently, books written in Pollen do not support scrolling (or it's just me? I am using Firefox on a Mac)
That should be just you, Pollen doesn’t intercept any scrolling, doesn’t set any scroll handlers, doesn’t use custom scrollbars, etc.
Pollen: the book is a program
41–50 of 97 posts
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#42It's interesting to see a somewhat widespread shift away from the separation of code, templates, styles, and text model of publishing things (mostly websites, but most publishing can be boiled down to that if you squint), where code/templates/style get merged into one. React does this. Pollen seemingly takes it even further and sticks the text in the code, too. Or, rather sticks the code in the text, I guess. It's a…
IMHO, it is a move from separation of file types to separation of actual concerns.
Well, these are separate concerns. If you have a document, with no interactivity, using just standard elements, but lots of different themes, then separating into content and style makes perfect sense.
And I’d prefer if we could go back to that as much as possible.
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#43Is the ‘lozenge’ a Racket-ism or is it unique to this project? I understand the logic around using a character that’s hardly used in regular writing – to avoid escaping – but it seems as though it would be hard to use in practice.
It’s a racket-ism to use unicode characters wherever possible, yes.
Racket by default also doesn’t use the keyword "lambda", but instead uses "λ".
You can obviously use something different, if you want to, but the default, and recommended solution, is using unicode characters.
As Racket is frequently written in the DrRacket IDE, this also makes sense.
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#44Apparently, books written in Pollen do not support scrolling (or it's just me? I am using Firefox on a Mac)
That should be just you, Pollen doesn’t intercept any scrolling, doesn’t set any scroll handlers, doesn’t use custom scrollbars, etc.
In fact I tried on Chrome and it seems to work there. Not sure what is going on in Firefox
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#45It's interesting to see a somewhat widespread shift away from the separation of code, templates, styles, and text model of publishing things (mostly websites, but most publishing can be boiled down to that if you squint), where code/templates/style get merged into one. React does this. Pollen seemingly takes it even further and sticks the text in the code, too. Or, rather sticks the code in the text, I guess. It's a…
When I learned HTML in the 90's and early 2000's you got a strong notion that they were separate concerns. When I was learning react when it came out I had such a visceral reaction I just wanted to run away. After coding within react for the past couple years I strongly feel that react has got it right. A concern is after all a generality that has the potential to generate a strong bias. My lesson is that concerns sh…
Of course React got it right because there's no violation of separation of concerns involved.
JSX is just syntactic sugar on top of method calls. One is perfectly free to extract the `render` functions into separate files and call them "templates". Unless the argument is that virtual DOM libraries are an inherently bad idea, I don't see what's to complain about separation of concerns.
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, it is a move from separation of file types to separation of actual concerns.
Well, these are separate concerns. If you have a document, with no interactivity, using just standard elements, but lots of different themes, then separating into content and style makes perfect sense. And I’d prefer if we could go back to that as much as possible.
Yes, a general template defined in an external style sheet or whatever format makes sense. However, revealing a message when there is an error, for example, is business logic and should be defined in code - be it styled components or something else.
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#47> I chose the lozenge as the command character because a) it appears in almost every font, b) it’s barely used in ordinary typesetting, c) it’s not used in any programming language that I know of, and d) its shape and color allow it to stand out easily in code without being distracting. > If you’re using DrRacket, you can use the Insert Command Char button at the top of the editing window to — you guessed it — insert…
He also advocate not using underline to denote links. In his practical typography book he practically hides all hyperlinks. I also find his redesigns of documentation pages uninviting to read. I find Butterick to be a passionate, opinionated, hard working, but ultimately a poor designer.
> He also advocate not using underline to denote links.
>In his practical typography book he practically hides all hyperlinks.
The visual style of a hyperlink is only relevant to the point that you know the hyperlink is there and can find it when you want to click on it. Most of the time, that's not a goal, so you want it to fade into the background unless the user has indicated that is their goal.
So my preferred style for hyperlinks in prose is a color that's right at the just-noticeable difference [1] relative the normal text. When you mouse over the paragraph, which indicates you are intending to click, the contrast increases.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-noticeable_difference
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also change the lozenge operator to a different character. Its just convenient to pick one you won't ever have to escape
That is until you find an obscure enough example that uses it.
I've never seen a vaguely popular programming language use ¬ and that is available on all keyboards (for some weird reason).
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#49Is the ‘lozenge’ a Racket-ism or is it unique to this project? I understand the logic around using a character that’s hardly used in regular writing – to avoid escaping – but it seems as though it would be hard to use in practice.
It’s a racket-ism to use unicode characters wherever possible, yes. Racket by default also doesn’t use the keyword "lambda", but instead uses "λ". You can obviously use something different, if you want to, but the default, and recommended solution, is using unicode characters. As Racket is frequently written in the DrRacket IDE, this also makes sense.
> Racket by default also doesn’t use the keyword "lambda", but instead uses "λ".
I'm not sure that's true:
Welcome to Racket v6.10.1.
> (define foo (lambda (x) (+ x 1)))
> (foo 1)
2