Explorations

Some things I’m thinking about and playing with.

Content

Design Pages

Migrate the Design pages to notes

Notes

Rename “TODO” to something like “Explorations” to deemphasize the productivity of it; add a redirect.

Ink

Commonmark

Support wiki-style cross references (see Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Cross-References). #high
- Support for fragment identifiers
- Note identifiers should resolve irregardless of folder hierarchy
- Support replacement text
- Drop support for path-based cross references to keep things simple #cleanup
- Update Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Cross-References #documentation
- Support intra-document links without an identifier: [[#header-identifier]]
Support for definition lists (see Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Definition Lists). #high
- Some definition list items should generate fragments for cross references

Notes

Allow for private notes (as opposed to just private sections in a note) #high
- Maybe even private directories? This would be great for the daily folder, possibly others.
- Backlinks from private notes shouldn’t be shown
- Links to private notes should be redacted in some way
Backlinks
- Backlinks should include some contextual content, ideally a couple of sentences.
#question Should there be another kind of navigation layered on top of notes? An index of all notes, or tag or folder listing

Structured Content

Ability to use the same structred content in multiple notes.
Ability to bind stuctured data to another name in a template.

Code

Fenced code blocks should be formatted and highlighted like other code blocks

Metadata

Allow titles to be specified using Markdown <h1> syntax #high

Mentions

Support a syntax for mentioning a person: @person. See Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Mentions.
Should mentions have a specific styling, possibly similar to private block placeholders?
Mentions within tasklists should be styled like tags

Sidenotes

What would a syntax shortcut for sidenotes look like? Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Sidenotes #high
Can the accessibility of sidenotes be improved?
Margin notes are currently super awkward. Can they be improved too?
- Support images in margin notes

Citations

Add a shortcut syntax for <cite> elements.

Accessibility

Stop using ::before and ::after for anything that should appear in plain text.
Use an audit step to warn about too-long alt text strings (150ish seems like a good upper bound)

Structure

Move the page title into the main element
- (This also means that postprocess units should work on the page title)
And consider using an <article> instead of a <div>

Layout

Improve mobile and tablet reading
- Stop scaling the viewport to 80% on mobile
- Support 1024w as a multi column layout
Rationalize the col6 and bgrid layouts
- Prefer using spans over areas?
- Consider a 12-column grid?
- Consider adjusting container widths so columns are whole integer widths?

Colors

Consider avoiding #ffffff and #000000.
- May need a filter in light mode to produce figures that match the background and body text.
Run colors through the new WCAG contrast algorithm.

Figures

Need a better way of attaching captions to images, so that I don’t have to write single line HTML for reasons. #high
Support vector figures, and run the colors through the site’s color palette #high
Process figures in parallel, to speed up building pages with lots of images
#cleanup Clean up the filter system.
- Filters may apply to light mode content too.
#cleanup Remove the video subsystem until it can be revisited?

Epigraphs and Blockquotes

Use a footer element inside a blockquote to source the quote.

Task Lists

#question When a task links to a note, should the backlink be marked up in a special way? Or perhaps it should go the other way: tasks on Notes should be aggregated into the Todo note?
#question Do placeholder notes generate task items automatically?

Citations and Bibliographies

#bug Items without authors should be sorted by their title in bibliography listings
#bug The external link icon for archive links are too small (inheriting the size of the archive URL)
Informal citation style improvements
- Include containers
- Include notes
#bug Why are the person and cite parser rules conflicting?

Content Warnings

Adopt bibliographic content warning system for pages

Private Blocks

Option to suppress the replacement notice

Math

Consider adding $$ as a syntax shortcut.
- Need a way to differentiate inline and display contexts.

Tables

#low Table style with tall braces around rowspan cells
A sans-serif style for tables that benefit from quicker reading / scanning (rather than looking nice)

Typography

Optical margin alignment for body text.
hanging-punctuation should not apply to code blocks. (Implementing a custom optical margin alignment scheme may be the best way forward.) #bug
Use the italic ampersand in headers
Contextual multiplication symbol replacement
Contextual -> to arrow replacement #low
Contextual spacing around some punctuation like :/[](){}
Revisit ligatures.
- Figure out a way to move some ligatures between the different feature sets.
- Which would then open up the possibility of using quaint ligatures in headers only, and other ligatures in body text.
Revisit figures; consider eliminating the extra letter spacing.
Restructure how point sizes are managed
- Consider a modern modular scale, rather than a traditional printer’s scale?
#cleanup Metrics for monospaced code blocks should be calculated from fonts instead of hardcoded
#bug letter-spacing should not include an extra space after the letterspaced text.
Add additional spacing around quoted “CAPITALS” #low
#question Consider bumping the size of side notes a point or two
#question Is inline code disrupting the line height of text?
#question How difficult is it to modify the kerning table for a font? Can it be scripted, e.g. like a patch? Would be nice to fix “Ja”, others.
#question What’s the right way to improve spacing around punctuation, especially brackets, parentheses, and dashes?
Icon font cleanup
- Build the icons font ourselves rather than using an online tool
- Adopt the new icon font across the site
Revisit using a Japanese webfont using a different subsetting strategy
Remove most of the Garamond ordinals that aren’t being used
#bug #cleanup The FontProcessor should not emit package info (like the CSS file) if working only a subset of the fonts specified via command line options
Expand the GSUB substitution dropping code to handle more complex substituions, allowing us to reenable Inter’s calt table with only a couple of the rules that position symbols vertically.

Transclusions

Consider a mechansim for transclusions. Could be useful for snippets of text included in multiple notes. See Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Transclusions

Admonitions

Consider a mechansism for admonition blocks. Could be used to break up a long document, providing callouts or other ways to highlight content. See Ink’s CommonMark Extensions: Admonition Blocks

Server

Consider migrating away from Apache, since it’s all just static files with some other rules
Run stylesheets through an optimization pass
#question Consider pre-compressing resources with Zopfli and Brotli
- #question Does this make sense for all HTML files too? Or just e.g. CSS?
Add Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy and Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy headers

Feed

Figure out how to handle formatted source code; should the original text be copied without all of the spans or should color styles be inlined?
- The indentation doesn’t seem to be carried over correctly either; 2ch indented lines are indented 4ch?
Code blocks seem to have an extra newline at the end.
Sidenote numbers should be replaced with superscript digits?
- (Should they be replaced in the main generated content as well? What do screenreaders do with superscript digits?)
External links don’t need both the accessibility text and the external link arrow.

Cleanup

#cleanup PathUtilities.mkdirpSync should be replaced with direct fs calls
#cleanup fs.rm should be used instead of fs.rmdir
Get rid of Moment.js and use built-in types

Recipes

#bug Ingredients should be in an ol instead of ul, since there’s an implied order to the their use?
#bug Ingredients should not spread out to the height of the group when the steps are longer (may need a container element to take up space in the parent grid’s layout)
Implements should use the span.name element for a consistent structure?
Make prep steps stand out more. Maybe they get some kind of label?
Consider Barlow for subrecipe headers, to match the step numbers.
Make subrecipe sections stand out more somehow? (background color?)
Group recipe sections into a wrapper element to eliminate the lastgroup class.
Recipes should print nicely (using the grid style, probably).
Additional kinds of content
- Images
- Recipe description
- Notes that apply to the recipe rather than a single step

Notes Linking Here

Notes