Chapter 13: And now what?

Where to start

This is not a book. It is almost a proposal. The start of future work. I'd like for a new movement to be born from here. We have been doing things the same way for a long time and I would like to break with this. But in a beautiful way. Nice. And within the reach of everyone.

This is my contribution.

Perhaps this may seem a bit pretentious, but I like the idea so much that I cannot help it. Excuse my audacity.

With this book I have tried to explain how I understand STxT, and what I meant to do when I created this language. Have I really created it? I guess the language was already there, and the only thing I had to do was bring it out into the light. I'd like to think that I made it as a sculptor.

Pending things

There is much left to do if we really want to adopt this technology. I'm going to give ideas, although surely I can’t even imagine the most interesting applications right now.

This is the beautiful part, you toss an idea and it no longer belongs to you, it grows and matures alone, and you can just watch where it goes :-)

In future editions I hope to be able to "delete" some of these things, and add new ones that are now unthinkable.

Editors with assisted content

We have many text editors, for many different languages. How would you like STxT editors? Our favorite editor, but now collecting web semantics and creating any type of structured content. Quickly and easily. For everyone. Now the content rules come up alone. With descriptions. Content is easy and quick to create. By everyone.

Libraries

We need STxT parsers in any programming language. There is much work to be done here. Fast and efficient language parsers.

It's like carrying what we already have in XML to STxT. And there is a lot.

Language converter

Surely we have languages that we don’t like, or that we believe can be simpler. We can pass directly to STxT or make converters that pass from STxT to another more specialized, but less semantic language.

For example we have Latex, second to none in terms of quality of output documents, but a bit difficult for most people. What would a STxT to Latex converter be like? We could make document types (articles, letters,...) and their converters to Latex. The original text would be very clear (STxT) and the final result file (pdf) would be excellent.

This would allow computer techs to keep more specialized technologies, and the rest to use simple formats like STxT.

Language substitution

This can be done in a lot of sites, XML documents, RSS's, special text files, program configurations; there are thousands of sites where a language or files could be replaced directly by STxT.

What would we gain? We would have enough with just one editor, texts would be easier to maintain, and by having a grammar we would also have the description of what a document should look like.

Semantic Web

There is so much work to do that I will only tell you to look again at the previous chapter, you hypnotize yourselves, and... go ahead!