Jonathan Frederickson

New blog post about something I realized this morning re: potential chat apps that could let you pass around capabilities: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/structured-messaging.html

In summary: I think message contents should also be treated as structured data rather than just as strings! Feels like something I should have realized sooner, but it's funny how the brain doesn't always make connections that seem obvious in retrospect

#ocap #spritely

A brief aside on structured messaging — Terracrypt

Apr 11 at 6:43pmWeb
Show threadRidley3d ago
@jfred I think I also like it better as structured data than parsing meaning out of a string. Seems more intentional and less prone to unexpected problems.
Show threadJonathan Frederickson3d ago

@ridley Yeah. Of course at some point you'll need to parse strings for e.g. user input, but I think the more you can make the application's internal representation a data structure rather than a string, the better.

How users interact with non-string parts of the data structure while writing messages becomes an interesting UX question; I think Slack-style menus/completion when you type a prefix character (@, /, etc) feels nice.