

Fangle - reactive text generation from markdown - jotux
http://jotux.github.com/fangle/

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jalfresi
Doesn't this miss the point of Markdown? I thought the main selling point of
Markdown was that for plain text reading i.e. the markdown was clear and
understandable as plain text. This introduces a bunch of additional features
that can ONLY be represented accurately once parsed to HTML.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I didn't think Markdown was invented because
the world needed yet another markup language.

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wodow
It's just using Markdown as the base for an alternative language to Tangle's
HTML+JS. The point is simplifying the writing of interactive documents.

Tangle: <http://worrydream.com/Tangle/>

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jotux
This is correct and I guess when I titled the article "reactive text
generation from markdown" I implied it should be some kind of new markdown
language, which is not what I want.

>The point is simplifying the writing of interactive documents

Yes.

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chmike
Jeff Atwood suggested to upgrade Markdown in this blog post
[1]([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-
markd...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-
markdown.html)). Does anyone know where this stands ?

Maybe this system could be suggested as an addition to _the new_ Markdown if
this is in progress somewhere.

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cgag
I'd recommend pre-populating it with some examples. I didn't really know what
to expect or what to do when I got there, I thought it was just live
generating formatted markdown.

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sachleen
There is an example, see the Examples dropdown above the textarea.

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wodow
It would be great if the first example used something more real world than
'power levels'.

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saebekassebil
Some weird stuff going on with the if clauses:

Switch His power level is 9000. It's almost 9000?!"

This should probably be:

#### Switch His power level is [p6=5000[5000..20000,1000]]. It's
[warning_2[(p6 < 8000),(p6 < 9000),(p6 == 9000),(p6 > 9000)]low.,almost
9000?!,9000!,OVER 9000!!!]

Anyways, I think this makes for completely unreadable Markdown, which is the
totally opposite direction of what it ought to be.

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djd
Not a JS/Programming Pro here so please pardon my ignorance. One major problem
faced by me in JavaScript is the weird handling of floats. This kind of
application will end up dealing with floats. How should I avoid errors? or
does Tangle itself handle the conversions?

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jasonm23
You can get decent float parsing by doing Number() casting / regex cleanup,
instead of parseFloat(). I don't know how tangle does it though

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jotux
I'm using this js sprintf library:
[http://www.diveintojavascript.com/projects/javascript-
sprint...](http://www.diveintojavascript.com/projects/javascript-sprintf)

~~~
jasonm23
Right, yeah I use this one too for anywhere I need printf a-like formatting in
JS.

But isn't this the other side of the coin? Formatting numbers as strings, not
parsing strings to floats? (forgive me if I'm off base on this, I'm only
looking sideways at this right now.)

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dirkk0
This is great! I tweeted this but couldn't add you because I didn't find your
twitter name or contact address ...?
<https://twitter.com/dirkk/status/294333906902196224>

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est
This is the future of Hyper Text. We really need to innovate on the
connotation of Hyper Text besides Hyper Links.

Can we see native browsers support this kind of markdown in the next decade?

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solox3
Jotux, would you please provide us with an example use case?

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jotux
There is a dropdown box called "examples" at the top where you can select an
example.

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solox3
No, a "use case" is what we can do with it, not what it does.

So far, I am clueless as to where and how I can utilise this technology.

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oscilloscope
Explaining fixed income investments to new investors.

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jotux
My initial idea was to have reactive-text enabled forum posts or chat input.
So in, say, a hacker news comment you could embed equations in the markdown
formatting that explain a specific calculation. The recent posts about how
much you need to save to retire with a decent income would be a good example.

