A Wishlist

This post was started on 2020-07-13. It was published on 2020-07-13.

A few days ago, Prof. Shriram Krishnamurthi started writing on a website using his own Racket-based website generator, including a detailed About page. I particularly liked the section about why the site is not a blog, which includes some thoughts about how he wants the site to develop. That got me thinking that I should write down what I want from Colophon. I’ll try to update this post as and when the particular features are implemented (or discarded).

In no particular order:

• Code snippets.

  Basic syntax highlighting is a start, but since I’d like to use Colophon to write technical articles, there’s a lot more I’d like to add. I’d like to have a button to copy code to the clipboard. I’d also like to link intelligently to GitHub (or some other code hosting), though I’m not sure what that looks like. I can also imagine compiling some snippets to WebAssembly and then running the result in the browser, though that might take a lot of work.

• Powerful Collections and Indexes.

  This deserves its own post, but I want Colophon to support more than the traditional, reverse-chronological, blog format. That format has a recency bias that I only think is useful if your site really is a web log. Otherwise, it should be possible to collect and display writing in a variety of different ways. This implies some sort of organization systems (tags, categories, collections, series, or multiple of these). However, since Colophon should be as static as possible, I also want to avoid regenerating indexes every time something changes.

• Tracking Changes and Revisions.

  Related to the above, Colophon should support more deliberative writing and that means more than just tracking draft and publication status. Ideally, Colophon would plug into some kind of standard version control system, and allow readers to look back through versions of an article. Prior to that, there should be a way to mark changes, provide change summaries, and have them show up in the output in an easily identifiable, non-intrusive way.

• Notes and Asides.

  Revision notes are just one of a variety of notes and asides that a Colophon author might include as part of their posts. These notes should be displayed in a way that makes them easy to read, but is also unobtrusive. I think I Love Typography makes very good use of sidenotes (as well as Tufte CSS and its derivatives). Tooltip notes, like what Marco Arment uses, would also be a good alternative, especially on small screens (perhaps even to the point of justifying some JavaScript). What I do not want is note markers as links that take readers to the actual note at the bottom of the screen, away from the relevant text.

• Intelligent Excerpts.

  One of my pet peeves is how bad the excerpts are for some popular publishing platforms. At the very least, an excerpt should not cut off in the middle of a sentence. Colophon should support better excerpts, both for the purpose of sharing on social media plaforms, but also for generating readable indexes. I’m undecided on the mechanism. Colophon currently supports a more tag that pulls out preceding text as an excerpt, and a description field in an article’s metadata. Supporting a excerpt tag in the article’s text seems reasonable, and I need to figure out something intelligent to do when the author doesn’t specify an excerpt.

• Rich Hyperlinks.

  In my opinion, most writing on the web doesn’t use hyperlinks nearly as much as they should. Colophon should encourage lots of rich hyperlinks, both internally to other posts on the same site, and externally to other sites. Part of this is presentational (changing the styling or using icons for certain types of links), and some of it is book-keeping (generating paragraph-level permalinks for specific referencing, or automatically linking certain phrases). Those are just two ideas, there are probably other interesting things I’ll come up with over time.

• RSS support.

  Yes, RSS still exists, and it’s still my preferred way to read blogs. I will probably use the better Atom format (rather than RSS 2.0) and implement a feed generator in the future. However, given that Colophon’s goal is to explicitly be for non-blog-like websites, I need to think about how to do this properly. Instead of republishing an entire article to the feed whenever something changes, maybe only a change summary should be published? This probably also affects indexes in some way I haven’t thought about yet.

• A Theming System.

  I like pretty things, especially when they match. For now, I’m mainly concerned with color themes for different page elements. One particular thing I want is to support theme variants, so that a theme could have, say, light and dark variants. A basic version of this exists already, but would require some clean up and streamlining. I’m not sure if I want this to be exposed to the reader as an option, or only be configurable at build time. Thinking ahead, CSS now supports variables, it may be possible to support different fonts and other niceties.

I don’t have a particular order in which I’d like these things to be implemented. In fact, most of them will probably be implemented piecemeal, and rebuilt several times before I get to a version I’m happy with. Colophon is going to be in experimental status for a long time (perhaps indefinitely), but I’ll scratch particular itches whenever they get itchy enough.