Sunday 8 November 2015

Not in our Stars

Brief summary for tweet length attention spans

We can get back the much-mourned favorite star on twitter by an 'add a comment' retweet with a šŸŒŸ emoji eg:

executive summary in bullet form

This has the following advantages:
  • Lets you use star again, or any other emoji that better expresses nuance.
  • Notifies the person starred, just as 'like' does
  • shows up in your feed (but not in your favorites list)
  • works in all twitter clients as it shows the emoji and link by default, and the linked-to tweet in official ones
  • can be liked and retweeted in its own right
and some drawbacks:
  • is not counted as a like or a retweet (this is true for all quoted tweets)
  • is a bit more obtrusive than the old favorite
  • takes more than one click to create

Historical exegesis and discussion of semiotics

Back in the dawn of twitter, new ways of using it were created by users, sporadically adopted, and then reified first by the vibrant client ecosystem, and eventually by official Twitter clients. Hashtags, @ replies and retweets started this way, as microsyntax or picoformats. Favorites were added early on and had a favstar-like top ten list with the lovely url slug 'favourings'. Your favorites were always public, and obviously so (unlike Google reader's which scared users). But when they caused notifications and showed up in timelines as actions, people were disconcerted.

The very opacity of the star meant that people could imbue it with its own meaning, and the nuances of what faving meant have been long-discussed - see Jessica Roy in Time for an example. Hence the immense hand-wringing over Twitter's change from star to heart and favorite to like. Perhaps they were led by AirBnB's 30% engagement boost when they made the change? The difference is one of semiotics though - when you apply a heart to a place to stay that is clearer than applying it to a tweet; it may still be a nuanced note on the host, or ironic, but the layers of meaning are more limited than in a tweet. With a tweet there are many more possible signifiers you may be indicating favour or attention to. Who saying it, who's @-tagged, hashtags, links, embedded media, the threads extending before or after, can all be grist for that little pointer.

However, there is another user-driven pattern that Twitter has not paid much attention to - emoji as replies. If you look through emojitracker there are nearly a billion uses of the šŸ˜‚ emoji and over a billion of the various hearts. This is a way people use to express the missing nuance that a single system-chosen glyph doesn't convey. Now you can reply to people with this directly, but that doesn't have the right effect; it is directly responding to the person, not the tweet, and relying on twitter threading to handle it.

Twitter's new 'quote tweet' option, hidden under the retweet button, gives a better way:

Shown in twitter with the quoted tweet inlined:

Shown in classic clients as a star and a link. This is a public post, clear in intent, and directed at the tweet with its associated media and nuance, just as a favorite was.

There is more flexibility here - repeated emoji; multiple emoji

In fact, had twitter thought this through they could have saved time on the disappointing new "polls" feature by emulating Slack's 'reacji' voting instead.

In the meantime, join me and the billions of other emoji tweeters in using a star reply to indicate your favoring. originally published on kevinmarks.com

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Friday 6 November 2015

HTML as TeX replacement

Stuart notes Lee Phillips’s critique of HTML compared to TEĪ§

However the author's idea of HTML is not quite up to date; he ignores how CSS and SVG combine with HTML to add richer typography. First he complains about hyphenation and ligatures. Hyphens are in CSS Text Level 3 and are implemented in many browsers though not yet Chrome. Ligatures are in CSS Fonts Level 3 and supported in many browsers too — Apple has done it for years. Here we have the TEĪ§ example, live rendering from your browser, and what Safari Mac made of it. Note the hyphenation and the ligatures. Also, I took out the spaces around the em-dashes that Lee Phillips oddly put in.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Next Phillips takes on mathematical equations. His first example is eiĻ€ = −1. Note how that was displayed fine inline, just by using <sup>, which has been in HTML for years, along with <sub> which I used to show the TEĪ§ e.

Phillips is right that doing more complex equation layout in pure HTML is difficult. Fortunately, we do have SVG for arbitrarily precise positioning of text and graphics. I took his example of Stokes equation, and put it through Troy Henderson's LaTeX Previewer (which I found by googling 'tex to svg'). Here we are:

Top

Here is the elementary version of Stokes' Theorem:

Go to top

Now, the SVG there, though scalable, is not ideal - it renders as paths, not characters. If I use SVG text, I can get it selectable:

∫šØ∇ך…∙š‘‘šØ = ∮∂šØ š…∙š‘‘š«

Here's the SVG code for that. You can see the tighter control. 

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="200" height="40" >
<text x="0" y="27" style="line-height:125%; font-size:18px; font-family:Serif;">
 <tspan style="font-size:36px;">∫</tspan>
 <tspan style="font-size:12px;" baseline-shift="sub">šØ</tspan>
 ∇ך…∙š‘‘šØ = <tspan style="font-size:36px;">∮</tspan>
 <tspan style="font-size:12px;" baseline-shift="sub" dx="-10px">∂šØ</tspan> š…∙š‘‘š«
</text>
</svg>

However, you may not see all the glyphs, as I am using the special unicode characters for Mathematical letters, and your browser or device may not have those. Here's a version with ordinary latin and greek letters:

∫Ī£∇×F∙dĪ£ = ∮∂Ī£ F∙dr

Phillips may be superficially right that HTML doesn't give as much typographic control as TEĪ§, but when you compare to the full web suite, including CSS and SVG, that conclusion can't be sustained; indeed even his point about macros could be solved by using javascript as well, though I prefer my web pages to be declarative.

That said, many of the CSS specs I have linked to are still being edited, so this is a good time to try out authoring your mathematical papers that way and possibly proposing changes.

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