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I've taken a look at some of the examples of HyperTIES Markup Language from your links. It seems so logical and easy to follow. It was interesting for me to see

by taubek 5y ago

I've taken a look at some of the examples of HyperTIES Markup Language from your links. It seems so logical and easy to follow. It was interesting for me to see that it even had a conditional display of content.

DonHopkins 5y ago
We considered using SGML, but decided not to, because we wanted to focus on ease of use and writability and maintainability for hypermedia authors. Yes, it had macros and conditionals. I wrote the initial markup language interpreter in FORTH, so I could drop into Forth and do all kinds of crazy things, and it could even compile storyboards into FORTH words (one word per each storyboard) that it compiled and dumped out to a binary image, so it could start up and display pre-formatted compiled pages quickly (kind of like partial evaluation, and Smalltalk VM images). That was probably a premature optimization (or maybe not, since a 4 meg Sun 3/50 was pretty slow), but that was just the kind of stuff FORTH is great for, and it was fun to write FORTH code that wrote FORTH code that called C code that wrote PostScript code that wrote PostScript code! ;) I used Mitch Bradley's awesome 68k Sun FORTH system, which could dynamically link and call back and forth to C code (by running the Unix linker to dynamically relocate a library to run inside a chunk of FORTH's memory -- SunOS didn't have actual support dynamically linked shared libraries yet), and he later developed it into OpenFirmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 Later we replaced FORTH with a custom HyperTIES Markup Language interpreter that was written in C, and supported macros and conditionals and shared definitions, kind of like style sheets (but using the same markup language, not one language for markup and another for style). The coolest part was that you could script and configure reusable embedded NeWS "applets" in PostScript, like custom pie menus for font selection and other commands, text editors, user interface widgets, PostScript driven animations, interactive popup targets, buttons that sent commands to NeWS, Emacs, FORTH, the Unix shell, etc, not unlike Java applets or web components that web browsers eventually supported. It was no coincidence that the same guy who wrote Java (James Gosling) also wrote those two other languages we used to implement HyperLook, long before he wrote Java: NeWS PostScript and UniPress Emacs MockLisp!

by taubek 5y ago

DonHopkins 5y ago

We considered using SGML, but decided not to, because we wanted to focus on ease of use and writability and maintainability for hypermedia authors. Yes, it had macros and conditionals. I wrote the initial markup language interpreter in FORTH, so I could drop into Forth and do all kinds of crazy things, and it could even compile storyboards into FORTH words (one word per each storyboard) that it compiled and dumped out to a binary image, so it could start up and display pre-formatted compiled pages quickly (kind of like partial evaluation, and Smalltalk VM images). That was probably a premature optimization (or maybe not, since a 4 meg Sun 3/50 was pretty slow), but that was just the kind of stuff FORTH is great for, and it was fun to write FORTH code that wrote FORTH code that called C code that wrote PostScript code that wrote PostScript code! ;) I used Mitch Bradley's awesome 68k Sun FORTH system, which could dynamically link and call back and forth to C code (by running the Unix linker to dynamically relocate a library to run inside a chunk of FORTH's memory -- SunOS didn't have actual support dynamically linked shared libraries yet), and he later developed it into OpenFirmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 Later we replaced FORTH with a custom HyperTIES Markup Language interpreter that was written in C, and supported macros and conditionals and shared definitions, kind of like style sheets (but using the same markup language, not one language for markup and another for style). The coolest part was that you could script and configure reusable embedded NeWS "applets" in PostScript, like custom pie menus for font selection and other commands, text editors, user interface widgets, PostScript driven animations, interactive popup targets, buttons that sent commands to NeWS, Emacs, FORTH, the Unix shell, etc, not unlike Java applets or web components that web browsers eventually supported. It was no coincidence that the same guy who wrote Java (James Gosling) also wrote those two other languages we used to implement HyperLook, long before he wrote Java: NeWS PostScript and UniPress Emacs MockLisp!