[pilgrim0]

You cannot fully leave presentation concerns out of browsers. Layout and decoration is an integral part of authoring, it’s supported at the markup level. HTML and friends are practically rendering instructions at this point, as if a PostScript for screens. Worse, this has a double edge, for instance, not always what should be a single paragraph of text comes as a single <p> tag, because the mere availability of styling leads people to author ad-hoc structures, since they know it could always be visually reconciled.

What I’m proposing with the research is a data structure transmitted as text. This text payload is the equivalent of a file system volume or tree. Each line in this payload is the equivalent of a file. It’s only a semiotic analogy to file systems.

Given this is such a trivial structure, it’s easy to develop multiple rendering approaches that maintain an isomorphism between the text representation and graphical representation. It does not transmit layout information, the syntax itself is the higher-order layout.

You might wanna checkout the source of this article by appending index.fifo.txt to its URL.