61–70 of 233 posts
A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page. Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive. And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks. Makes perfect sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to the XML model again?
XML is a document. A relational database is a relational database. Both can be used to create a tree structure. Notion does it wit a "block" table, each block having a parent block id, and a list of child block ids, allowing tree traversal in both directions.
But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure you still have many of the same issues. Each node will need to entail the context of its parent, which means that you'll need to know things like transitive closures in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g. deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create pointers below it? And tracking history could get complicated because it might span both the content of the node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a change where the text was bold and a block was moved around). Where do you put transactions?
I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun problem to solve!
A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page. Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive. And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks. Makes perfect sense.
Most people would not set up something like a git repo to track changes and comment on the content for example.
A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page. Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive. And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks. Makes perfect sense.
That is a weird criticism. A document is clearly not a webpage, main use of Google docs is easy collaboration and that’s not really a thing with html. Most people would not set up something like a git repo to track changes and comment on the content for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly…
I totally understand this vision, google docs, google sites, google drive must be really down in Google's priority list. Heck, Google Meet was down there up until two years ago. The problem I think is that, little by little, users start stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to realize that there's clear benefits. I used to be a 100% google person, then we started using dropbox paper for documents, notion…
I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to have 7-10 different suppliers for different products (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki, chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system.
There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger players to acquire the others and move back towards a cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack under one operation.
Hello Ms wordpad
Also, it's pretty shocking that people forgot the term "rich-text".
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…
It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and previous) is spreading, do you agree ??
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 like to be able to ditch the page splits. But I'd love to have an option to keep the "paper" shape, albeit an infinite strip (toilet paper style). All this white horizontal space distracts me
I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to say that I would probably fight to the death against a redesign that would remove the page splits from my toilet paper.
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…
> 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…