

Substance.io launched — it's web-based document authoring and publishing - _mql
http://substance.io

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moe
The UI is visually pretty but confused me.

More critically, I'm still not sure what it does. Your "Learn more" blurb is
way too long and put me to sleep before I reached the end of the first
paragraph.

 _Write and annotate documents right in the browser._

Okay that part is clear, I guess. But where do the documents come from? Is
this a CMS? Wiki? Some sort of community where I can also see other peoples
documents? What problem are you solving? Who is your target audience? Why is
all this not explained on your frontpage?

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anigbrowl
Yes, I'm a little confused too. So there's basic markup in a WYSIWYG editor,
and...? Maybe a short video defining the problem and presenting this as the
solution would help. Right now it feels like a lightweight version of a wiki.

~~~
_mql
Sure you can compare it to a Wiki/CMS in some way. Importantly Substance is a
Semantic Editor, that means you're editing Content, not the visual
representation. Documents are expressed as data (as far as possible).

~~~
anigbrowl
I _think_ I get what you're working towards and will keep an eye on it. It
will definitely attract more users and developers if you can highlight more
use cases, and show where it differs from other platforms.

When I see 'semantic' in relation to the web, right now I am often
disappointed because it often involves an incomplete vision of 'the web would
be more useful if everything was tagged properly.' What I _want_ from a
'semantic' tool - and this is asking a great deal, almost science fiction - is
a distributed ontology matcher with a basic ability to answer simple
questions. This is a general challenge for the 'semantic web,' not just for
you. So I hope you will keep exploring the possibilities.

Let me give you an extreme example. I navigate to a news page and see
'Breaking: important event takes place!' Apparently there are 3000 news
stories about this important event. Obviously, I do not want to read all 3000,
and that number is only a reflection of how many people consider the story
interesting. 2900 of those stories will probably be identical, give or take a
few words. On a true 'semantic web' I would get an abstraction of the
information common to all the stories, and tools to help me find the very
small number of stories with unusual additional information - while filtering
out websites run by fanatics and crazies. So in a semantic editor, I would
like to write in natural language, and have the computer extract simple
ontological fragments for use as complex search input. As I write about a
particular subject, the computer looks at what I am writing about, and a
constantly evolving selection of relevant reference material is available in a
side panel.

So if I begin writing about revolution in Egypt, I should begin to see more
and more reference material about Egypt, history, political theory, and
related subjects. I don't want to search for data; I want the computer to
search out data continually as a background task, based on what I am writing
about. You know those dense academic papers, where almost every sentence has a
footnote even if it stating something very obvious and well-known (mainly in
order for other readers to assess the quality of research)? A true semantic
editor will narrow the gap between collection and composition.

I am not expecting to just have this delivered, of course :) Instead, I hope
it provides some stimulating ideas.

~~~
_mql
Great pointers!

What I really want to include in the nearer future is entity extraction. That
means that we could send the text-contents of a document to an entity-
extraction service (like OpenCalais) in order to get back a list of entities
that are mentioned in the text (that's what documentcloud.org is doing). By
doing this, not only our documents could be tagged automatically, but also
scenarios like the ones you described are made possible (given that entity-
extraction can be performed fast enough). What do you think?

I may get back to you when I start working on it. It's on the queue for sure.
:)

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andrenotgiant
The way the site uses Embedded JS means it is completely un-crawlable for
search engines. I imagine in the future a nice source of incoming traffic
could be from long-tail referrals on whatever content is published, you might
want to think about how googlebot crawls the site.
[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:substance.io&hl=en&#...</a>

~~~
_mql
I'm aware of that. I'm going to make use of Google AJAX crawling scheme.
[http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.h...](http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.html)

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_mql
Source Code is at Github: <https://github.com/michael/substance>

This first release (0.1.0) is considered a Developer Preview. However given a
webkit-based browser you should already be able to use it seriously.

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kondro
An interesting dev release. I can see a lot of potential for this product.

Specifically I would love lawyers to start using products like this for
collaborative editing of contracts (which are very tightly structured anyway).
Of course there would need to be some revision history with diffs, but I'm
sure that will be added to this project in time.

I don't really like the global JS functions in the server code though.

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jamesjyu
Just a quick note: it took me forever to find the "Create an Account" call to
action on the front page.

~~~
jamesjyu
Similarly, the new document icon in the top right corner wasn't obvious to me
either.

~~~
lists
Same here

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EwanG
I try to register (I would really like this to make it possible for me to work
on my novel using my Android Tablet), but I keep getting an "Unknown Error".

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chanux
_Substance is released under the GPLv3. That means it's free for non-
commercial use._

Someone please explain this to me.

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djacobs
Security concern: clicking "log in" (without a username or password) logged me
in as a user called "Zyfon".

~~~
_mql
That'd be terrible. Can't reproduce it though. Which browser were you using?

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djacobs
Safari 5. It's not happening any more, apparently.

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gizzlon
Cool.. very cool.. IMHO the the freedom from vendor and format lock-in is your
greatest advantage

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maxogden
this is awesome. thank you for spending time on the wysiwyg problem and double
thank you for keeping it open source.

do you have a couch replication endpoint exposed through your api?

~~~
_mql
Not yet. You mean exposing an endpoint that allows you to replicate documents
a certain user owns? Like the idea!

There's already some synchronization/replication taking place but on a higher
level. That's trough Data.Graph#sync (<https://github.com/michael/data>) which
pushes data-nodes that have been modified to the server.

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meric
How to save as pdf?

~~~
_mql
This is a planned feature. We'll use LaTeX to render proper PDF's. We'll also
add images along with other content-node types.

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Cossolus
I think that's the most important feature, and would give your site an
advantage to using a wiki. Providing/exposing 'semantic structure' in
documents and separating style from structure is cool, but I don't think
that's a problem that people are clamoring to have solved, anymore than it's
already solved by various markup technologies.

A wiki that can exports its content as professional grade PDF files suitable
for publishing would be awesome, but that's a major feature, and my humble
advice would be to see if that's doable WELL before you do anything else.

I would actually be interested to know if anything already does that...

~~~
_mql
The problem I see with markup, is that for-non technical people it's hard to
understand and use. I think they would rather prefer a WYSIWYG-style. Wiki-
style-markup isn't for everyone. So that's why I chose WYSIWYG editing, but
with restricting it to just semantical annotations.

Regarding PDF. I totally see your point. And it has high priority. I got
offered some help by Kevin Lynagh
(<http://www.dirigibleflightcraft.com/index.html>) already. He'd help with
implementing LaTeX/PDF export of Substance Documents. You're invited to join
too :)

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jesstaa
UX Epic fail. Stupid javascript urls. Seriously don't break basic web
concepts.

