🌶 This proposal is under development. At the moment only this introductory page and a draft Authors First Manifesto is available. Star this repo or let me know if you're interested, either as a user or co-developer.
So many publishing tools: Jekyll, Pandoc, GitBook, Hugo, Gatsby, VuePress, Pelican, MkDocs, Eleventy, Nikola, Middleman, Metalsmith... and many more. Choice is great! But because each has its own rules and syntax for organizing and cross-linking content, your content is not very portable. Even though you're using a standard format like Markdown.
What Markdown, reStructuredText, Asciidoc and others do for writing individual pieces of content, TextAssembly will do for structuring and interlinking assemblies of them. Websites. Books. PDF documentation. Hyperlinked notes. Personal wikis. Anything composed of content spread across multiple files.
No new syntax to learn. Write in your favored format. Just organize and link your content together following a few natural and intuitive conventions. You can learn TextAssembly in five minutes.
Blow up the silos! We can standardize using intuitive and natural conventions without taking away any of the unique powers these tools have. Foster a seamless ecosystem of smart text assembly aware tools, such as editors that update links when file names or headings change, that let you go from writing to reading and navigating links without a publish step and then back to editing without skipping a beat.
Publishing tools will continue differentiate themselves and gain your loyalty though additional features such as powerful templating, beautiful typesetting and presentation, advanced navigation, pagination, search index generation, speed, reliability or many other things. They just don't get to lock you into their silo anymore.
TextAssembly disentangles authors from technical and proprietary esoterica and let's them focus on their content. It adheres to the Authors First Manifesto:
As an author I should be able to...
- author content without being tied to a specific tool or platform.
- structure my content as the content wants to be structured, not for the convenience or arbitrariness of a specific tool.
- read and navigate my content in the same tool and in the same view I use to write and edit. I shouldn't have to switch views or tools or go through a publishing step. The view can be WYSIWYG or show lightweight markup, but the links must be live. Let me do this without a network connection.
- use tools that cater to my needs, not theirs. Shift as much burden (complexity, cognitive load, tedious mechanical work) from authors (humans) to the tools (machines).
Free your content and free yourself!