Woah. When I last (tried to) start reading Ulysees, almost a year ago, I thought about this: An online "book club", allowing users to join in reading classics and participate in discussions on top of the text. That would have certainly helped me continue reading the book. Eventually I put the book back on the shelf, and wrote down the idea in my ~/ideas.md.
Your 'read' page [1] is exactly as I pictured it. Looks like an interesting, important effort. Kudos!
> The one unconventional suggestion is the idea of a correspondence between the characters of the source text and the HTML text.
Did you get a chance to check out fellow HN homepage link Paperman [1][2]? It offers exactly what you propose: Double-clicking on the results frame highlights the relevant line in the source, and vice versa. This could easily be adapted to match your suggestion.
This seems to correlate to a Hebrew expression "buying a cat in a sack", meaning taking something without confirming its quality.
Indeed, same legend is presented as the source for this expression as well.
> You read code when you're programming. The only difference is the mix of characters you'll see near each other. General readability matters -- when is it OK for a regular font to be unclear about which character (a zero or 'O') you're looking at?
The difference in mix of characters reflects on the design decisions made for the font type. Target use is important. Some types are great for titles, some for text bodies, some for logos. It makes sense to me that code is another category.
Yes, readability is important, but it's not binary. The level and aspects of readability required for a novel body are not the same as for an article title.
Differentiating between zero 0 and uppercase O is critical for code (and work terminals, and perhaps data tables), but IMHO isn't interesting when designing for text bodies. Same goes for 'rn' and other issues that have ever annoyed only programmers.
Pretty cool! Reminds me of the UI on medium.com (selecting text on view mode allows sharing and commenting, and on edit mode pops up a floating format toolbar).
I really like your idea, but what about content being changed/updated, instead of deleted?
For some use cases it would make sense to show the cache (when the original quote is no longer there), while for other it'd make sense to forward (some style update, or an important addition).
Off the top of my head, this move also means that most, or at least some, of the Opera developers who worked on its rendering engines, will now be contributing to WebKit and V8.
This might mean even faster development cycles for WebKit, the integration of new features that were not on top of Google's and Apple's lists, and some new complications introduced to the inner politics of the WebKit and V8 projects.
