201–210 of 233 posts
But why is there such a huge left indent of text?
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ismorphic to xml. it's markup. not structured data
TeX is a Turing complete programming language. It’s nothing but data and calls to subprograms.
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> PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.
What you're talking about is a failure in the "addressability" section of the digital media rubric. It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was before.)
It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary.
However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling.
So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.
I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc). Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google…
Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured. It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.
I'm not a huge google fan but I write a ton and I use google docs extensively, and I have to say I'm crying tears of joy seeing this update. Just yesterday I was complaining to a colleague about how a table he put in a google doc was hard to read because a page-break in one of the rows made it look like two rows when it was only one. Ask and you shall receive! Thank you google docs devs!!!
Except, the article says tables aren't supported, right?
Some features are not available on pageless docs: columns, page numbers, headers and footers, page breaks, etc
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A SQL database, with indexing configured correctly, allows you to look up a row in O(log(n)). A bag of XML bytes doesn't give you that. It takes, at best, a SAX parser to do an O(n) scan through the whole document to find stuff. Most DOM implementations give you O(1) indexing by ID, but they require you to parse it first, and that's going to take O(n).
Creating a database is >= O(n). While creating and editing a database, it is SOP to create/maintain and save data structures that provide fast access later. Is there some reason why you couldn't do the same for XML?
A database like SQLite allows you to perform structured queries at faster-than-O(n) speed straight off the disk.
Pages are human meaningful location references. Stop making this stuff harder!
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> My bet is on Google Docs style, Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion. Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion". I don't think that Microsoft should be w…
I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life. I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage cer…
I'm not in the business but I did once spend two weeks of my life QA'ing just bulleted list copy-paste edge cases for a content-editable based WYSIWYG wiki editor and I would like that time back thank you very much.
I run into the same thing with Inkscape, where it seems to assume I am drawing on a piece of paper and I have to jump through hoops to not see the stupid page borders.
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I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting. My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blo…
But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain text documents had existed for decades and would continue to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF format were so great that it was eventually standardized.