STxT: The Book

Where to Start

This is not a book. It’s almost a proposal. The beginning of future work. I’d like to see a new movement arise from this. We’ve been doing things the same way for a long time, and I’d like to break away from that. But in a beautiful, elegant way. And accessible to everyone.

Let this be my contribution.

This may seem a bit pretentious, but I like the idea so much that I can’t help it. Forgive my audacity.

With this book, I’ve tried to explain how I understand STxT and what I intended to do by creating this language. Did I really create it? I suppose the language was already there, and all I had to do was bring it to light. I’d like to think I did it like a sculptor.

Things That Still Need to Be Done

There’s a lot to be done if we really want to adopt this technology. I’ll give you some ideas, although the most interesting applications are probably beyond what I can imagine right now.

That’s the beauty of it: you launch an idea, and it no longer belongs to you, it grows and matures on its own, and you can only watch where it goes :-)

In future editions, I hope to "cross off" some of these items and add new ones that are currently unthinkable.

Editors with Assisted Content

We have many text editors for many different languages. What would you think of editors for STxT? Our favorite editor, but now collecting semantics from the web and creating any kind of structured content. Easily and quickly. For everyone. Now the content rules appear automatically. With descriptions. Content is easy and quick to create. For everyone.

Libraries

We need STxT parsers in every programming language. There’s a lot of work to be done here. Fast and efficient language parsers.

It’s like porting what we already have in XML to STxT. And there’s a lot of it.

Language Converter

Surely there are languages we don’t like, or that we think could be simpler. They can be converted directly to STxT or converters can be made to go from STxT to another more specialized, but less semantic language.

For example, we have LaTeX, unbeatable in terms of output document quality, but a bit daunting for most people. What would a converter from STxT to LaTeX look like? We could create document types (articles, letters,...) and converters from them to LaTeX. The original text would be very clear (STxT) and the final result file excellent (pdf).

This would allow IT experts to maintain more specialized technologies, and others to use simpler formats like STxT.

Language Replacement

This can be done in many places: XML documents, RSS feeds, special text files, program configuration files—there are thousands of places where a language or files could be directly replaced with STxT.

What would we gain? A single editor would be enough, texts would be easier to maintain, and by having a grammar, we’d also have a description of what a document should be like.

Semantic Web

There’s so much work to be done here that I’ll just say to go back and look at the previous chapter, hypnotize yourselves, and... go for it!