I noticed on Mark’s blog some posts using the ‘Tinderbox Reader’, a seemingly web-native renderer for Tinderbox files. While this is a very exciting development, it opens up a slew of questions - I wondered if @eastgate were in a place to anticipate and discuss them at all, or if this is a very early stage and not really ready for anything beyond testing right now?
(My question is whether this is a single javascript import, and whether it can be self-hosted, or if there’s a wild cascade of libraries; particularly noting Mark’s love of typographic indulgence and the spartan set of native web font families - and whether this suggests some back-filling of features to squeeze out Tinderbox documents onto the web and realise some kind of feature parities)
This is coming, in some form, but not in the imminent Tinderbox 11.8 release. How long? Not long.
The trial version is available to participants in the backstage program
At present, it’s a single line of Javascript to import the library, and a single placeholder div to indicate where on the page you want the Tinderbox Reader to appear.
It could also be self-hosted. You’d do an npm install in the directory where you want the library, and refer to that in that single line import in item 3.
Thanks Mark - as something I never considered to be on the horizon in any form, that it’s planned at all is remarkable. Thanks for the information, and hope I’ve not spoiled a future surprise!
About ten years ago, or so, there was somebody who hosted a web app where you could read your Tinderbox files online. I found it very helpful when I was traveling with just my iPad.
I’m pretty certain that would have been ‘Emberlight’, by Nate Matias & Fred Cheung (paper†). IIRC the TBX was hosted on github (or using git) and the web front end was PHP‡. The web offered a form of Map and Outline view plus a what we now know as the text pane—this being back before the app UI redesign going v5-v6. Web users couldn’t write directly to the TBX but could add annotations to notes that the TBX owner(s) could read and action. I can’t recall is the back-channel wrote into the TBX, but I do recall one side-effect of Emberlight was that the order/structure of the TBX (e.g. the order XML element attributes were stored) got tightened up a bit. Emberlight was c.2010 so would have spanned late v4.x early v5.x.
[edit]
I ought to add, that as recent graduates, Matias and Cheung had moved on into work and their new employer had IP ownwership issues re a side-gig like Emberlight which was essentially its demise rather than a failure of the concept. We should also note the capability of the web browser (and HTML) of 2026 is far removed from that of 2010.