[karl-j]

I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach.

I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance?

[1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...

[strogonoff]

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine).

Some of the challenges I see:

— Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch.

— Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes.

— Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.

[saizai]

Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look.

Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing.

Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically.

We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them.

Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative.

We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.)

3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice.

However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

[saizai]

PS I really like the garden vs stream metaphor for UNLWS-native "conversation". I agree that it's very apt. It nicely captures the spirit of non-linear interaction.

Thank you for this new way of looking at / describing it. We may borrow it for the UNLWS documentation. ;)