tangle startup

[humility....@gmail.com]

There are a lot of "education start-ups" getting funded. Many, I do not see how they provide value.

With "explorable explanations" Brett has stated a major problem and its solution. (Certain explanations are not as good as they could be; they would be better if tangled.)

A really usable data-driven documents markup would proliferate explorable explanations. But I think data sources will always be heterogeneous and require significant searching, collating, scraping, and munging to get into JSON, markdown tables, or whatever the desired output format is.

For this reason I believe the best way to spread explorable explanations would be a small company that hires a couple mungers, scrapers, and scripters to "tangle" existing documents. Those people might develop tools that make tangling easier. They could post their normalised datasets somewhere free and accessible. If they got clients, they would definitely increase readers' expectations that what they read be responsive/interactive/dynamic.

[Ben Boeckel]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 14:54:42 -0700, humility....@gmail.com wrote:
> For this reason I believe the best way to spread explorable explanations
> would be a small company that hires a couple mungers, scrapers, and
> scripters to "tangle" existing documents. Those people might develop tools
> that make tangling easier. They could post their normalised datasets
> somewhere free and accessible. If they got clients, they would definitely
> increase readers' expectations that what they read be
> responsive/interactive/dynamic.

FYI, this list (and library for that matter) is, AFAICT, pretty much
dead (questions occasionally, rarely responses). One library I found
which does similar things with is Knockout.js[1]. I also found it does
better performance since it can update variables as needed rather than
the entire page at once.

There's also Elm[2] if you prefer more functional style code over
JavaScript.

--Ben

[1]http://knockoutjs.com/
[2]http://elm-lang.org/