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joyce

Member

Registered: 2013-04-07

Posts: 17

[SOLVED] Porting X-Lit to an Open Source format

Hi,

I have no idea about document engineering - but I want to start writing hypertext short stories. I found this X-Lit document format, but it only runs with proprietay software. The document structure is defined with XML.

http://www.wordcircuits.com/xlit/

A application example is found here: http://www.wordcircuits.com/pieces/

The famous Milorad Pavic used this for his short story >>The Glass Snail<<  - http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/glasssnail/ - .

The story consist of text snippets who lives in an html node. The reader can navigate through the story and the reading history along the html nodes are stored. What Open Source  substitute are available to get the same effect ?

I spend some time in w3c school, but I cannot find an answer yet.

Last edited by joyce (2015-04-25 19:46:50)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,601

Re: [SOLVED] Porting X-Lit to an Open Source format

That reminds me of Hypercard

I don't have any good suggestions, but were I to put something together I would probably reach for a solution of Apache/Djanjo/Python on the server side and some javascript/ajax on the client side to processes those xml files (or roll your own format).  There is always the brute force solution of a whole lot of pages stores in some sort of rational directory tree to give them structure.

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joyce

Member

Registered: 2013-04-07

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] Porting X-Lit to an Open Source format

Bruteforce is not good.

The problem of electronic literature is that they relied on proprietary software vendor. The lock-in made them dependent on software upgrading. Since electronic literatur is still at the margin, software vendor has no incentive upgrade their software. Electronic literature never reached critical mass and deliver narratives on Desktop, Smartphone, Tablett-PCs etc. That is why I think an complete Open Source solution is right. The writer should use a Open Source toolchain to write like a programmer write code. Every document format of an electronic story has to contain an machine readable section about dependency and conflicts relation.

The short story example >>The Glass Nail<< shows how the document format influence the story. The author wrote two stories with two beginnings and two ending. Between the beginnings and the two endings there are several content nodes (story episodes) and edges (navigation links LEFT and RIGHT). The webserver record the click histories and at the end you got the click history showed and suggestion how to read it again.

My idea is to upgrade the xml document format and let it work like amazon recommendations. The webserver recommends reading paths according to the click histories of similar people with similar demographics offline/online. E.g. online demographics are digital identities on social network platforms (Facebook, twitter,...) and offline demographics are gender, age, ethnicity, class.

The click history is a list of html pages like

1.html
2.html
5.html
7.html
36.html
.......

So the I got for every reader a 2-dim vector of online X offline demographics and a click history as list to perform an recommendation algorithm. E.g. the heterosexual majority read an erotic episode different in comparison with sexual minorities. Moral authorities read this same episode differently - we got different click histories. I want to shuffle their perspectives with mixing their click histories.

joyce

Member

Registered: 2013-04-07

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] Porting X-Lit to an Open Source format

[SOLVED] I found the answer on a code searching engine. Thank for the hints.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: [SOLVED] Porting X-Lit to an Open Source format

You found the answer, but you're keeping it to yourself? Not really how we do things here....