Just found https://willcrichton.net/nota/ by @Will super cool! 👋

this is really great. clicking to see the citations in place is a no-brainer (once you’ve thought of it that is) that improves the reading experience incredibly. The symbol definition display was also really well done. Nice work!!!

Interesting work! But my first impression is very ambiguous. On one hand, this is the UX I want from a modern academic publishing system. On the other hand, I am not looking forward to domain-specific publishing technology. Interdisciplinary work is hard enough, we don't need publishing technology to add another barrier. And then there's that eternal bad feeling about using Web technology: for how long will we be able to read this demo?

it’s a fair concern @Konrad Hinsen but efforts like these are prototypes seeking to convince & evangelize people of the idea first. The implementation & standard should be figured out separately

@Srini K Unfortunately adoption of technologies seems to be unrelated to the considerations you list. The PDF story worked out rather well, but then there is the example of Word's DOC format, whose wide adoption has caused a lot of trouble and locked many people into proprietary software. And premature adoption of prototypes is a major disease in tech today. They just stop calling them prototypes.

also fair, but there’s a balance to be struck. Often the best way to learn if something works is to do and then learn from the experience, not iterate in a black box. I think there are some good counter examples here, like the internet … where the foundational principles were preserved & pushed for hard. In other cases (like the web), the low friction tech / design took over but the principles didn’t. Maybe a balance here is to push for new experiments & prototypes but preserve shared values (e.g. maybe stick to open source formats, so at least they can be rendered via future VM’s, etc)

I agree that finding the right balance is the key issue, and I don’t claim to know how to do that. I wish people were at least aware of this issue and would clearly state the status of their work: experiment, prototype, etc.

“The design choices here are assuredly not all optimal — Nota is very much a prototype, not a final system.” for what its worth 😉