Editors would have  carefully crafted native modules for viewing / editing each type of content and they would absolutely need to be native.

Viewers would be theoretically replaceable but the key of the whole experience would be minimal but good enough default modules that show how it’s done.

Then if someone wants the pure console equivalent or some proxy to make it viewable on an 8 bit computer, or more accessible, it can be done easily because the rules that define basic content types make that easier, unlike interpreting a modern web JS-ridden page.

Of course for a smooth transition you’d have  both the content to be viewed in native in the system and simple web exports for the outside world just showing off how cozy it is.

The temptation would be to make all this with HTML / CSS and base the whole system off it but this would defeat the whole idea of not having a humongous browser engine in the back.

#Fantasies #RetroFutureComputing

A center piece of a reimagined Peoples’s OSX Tiger rewrite would have to be some solution to simply replace the web browser with native modules for the most common stuff so you can avoid it most of the time. Not always, just most of the time.

A sort of Reader Mode everywhere but on steroids. But one that is also a Writer. And where sharing privately / publicly is just natural and transparent. A checkbox.

All content types are defined by a set of rules defining what content is. As simple as possible: folders with files and a few json for attributes.

These could be called Collections. You create collections of texts, or images, or sounds and they have attributes / links to each other.

The main idea is that you create content but appearance is ultimately left to the viewer module.

A Collection of .md files is what makes a blog for example. You have dates and other attributes but the viewer client decides how this is laid out based on user prefs among sane choices.

A Collection of .wav files would define a music album. A video series would work the same way.

#Fantasies #RetroFutureComputing