John Brown : historiography and poetry

I have placed a Curl e-book of Steven Vincent Benét's "John Brown's Body" at poets.aule-browser.com/svb-jbb-006.curl 

It seems to me that the varied historiography of Brown is relevant as we approach climactic crises both environmental and climatic with Harriet Tubman figures and Frederick Douglass figures and very likely a corps of instigators not unlike Brown. 

I will try to find a moment to add a facility to tag and link notes into the text and to add the relevant Whitman links and/or texts.

The Curl browser plugin is available at www.curl.com

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Kanji Aule Update

The Curl app's at kanji.aule-browser.com now include a Concise Dictionary of Japanese Kanji Words and Expressions.

Here is a screenshot:

Confucian Analects of Confucious in Curl

At phil.aule-browser.com/ancient/analects.html there is now a Curl-markup version of this text the understanding of which is crucial to assessing the political climate in China.

The above version includes Chinese Kanji  for critical passages. Another version in Enlish only and with a Serif font can be found at phil.aule-browser.com/ancient/analects-en.html.

Both require the Curl RTE browser plugin from www.curl.com.

Both pages use the identical source SCURL file but each main Curl file provides a different definition of {c } which is a text format procedure whose expression wraps each piece of Chinese content. In one page it returns the content and for the other page it returns en empty {text } expression.

The table of contents in the left panel indexes the chapters of the 20  ‘books’.

Albrecht Haushofer

I have added a second poem from Albrecht Haushofer's posthumous Moabiter Sonette to poets.aule-browser.com

The poets Aule or site now has both Der Vater and Der Bruder.

His brother lived and is said to have found the poets corpse where he had been murdered outside the prison in the last days of the NSDAP terror regime.  His father later committed suicide.

The poetry markup is in MIT Curl from www.curl.com and requires their safe and secure RTE (runtime engine) browser plugin.

Curl is a trademark of Sumisho Computer Corp, Tokyo.

Duineser Elegien / Duino Elegies / poetry markup

Over at aule-browser I have placed a page with the first elegy from Duino Elegies.

The German text is in a minimal HTML layout so that you can create you own web page with notes.

The layout is not as useful or minimal as I can offer in Curl, but it seems useful.

notes: die findigen Tiere [...] in der gedeuteten Welt  perhaps as in the Adamic naming of the animals of the field ( the passage is followed by the Baum; cp opening of the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus.)

Alternative markup:

stanza[1] line[-3] words["noch"] style["spaced-letters"] 

but this placed in a separate 'markup-style' file included by the poem viewer/internet resource browser and NOT in the cleanly formatted text.

Inline markup dates from paper publishing, slow computers and conventional programming languages.

Edmund Husserl's 1927 encylopedia article on Phenomenology

Over at aule-browser.com there are now two links to alternate versions of Edmund Husserl's 1927 article on phenomenology: one is a Curl version of the text and one is a version for readers new to his awkward German style.  The latter requires a screen with at least 1024 pixels width (for the time being.)

At the level of web code, the difference between the two is minimal: both use the same source file.  That text file has minimal markup - so it remains very readable and easy to correct.  But the minimal markup in one case does very little and in the other case it reformats the text line-by-line.  As a result, the second version breaks down every sentence into a bite-size phrase formated rather like a paragraph, but with inverse indenting.

Very simple Curl text procedures are declared which permit this: in one case display the text and in the other case, re-format the text. The procedures are
  {article }
  {section }
  {para  }
  {ln }

It is the last which results in most of the reformatting, while the {para } markup has the effect of preserving white-space in the text.  {article } wraps the entire piece and {section } wraps each original division of the article.

This is very similar to the minimal markup which I use for poems
   {poem }
   {stanza }

More information on Curl can be found in English at curl.com and in Japanese at curlap.com

Pharo Curl

It took some effort again to get Curl markup running as an alternative to HTML+JavaScript on Seaside 3.0 on Pharo 1.1.1 Smalltalk.

The worst nuisance was Seaside using a method named text: for the equivalent of stream nextPutAll: or document print

This is because text is a common declarative identifier in Curl markup.  But it is only an annoyance and without examing available selectors at runtime or usinf perform: I can't see a workaround while leaving Seaside intact.

What was vexing was to still have to modifiy the WAAdmin class to defeat HTML-bias built into the framework.  And one or two other known quirks.

If only Seaside would embrace Traits on Pharo Smalltalk!  Traits would make it so clear that the choice of markup can be separated from the choice to use continuations, to use halos ...

Traits might also reduce the reliance on the Decorator pattern.  In a language with late binding, this leads to odd code, such as assigning a stream to an object whose class name and instance identifier clearly mean that it is not a stream ( but of course it is a decorator of a stream.)

Traits might reduce the reliance on the visitor pattern whcih I think reduces the understandability of code far more than double-dispatch itself because of the proliferation of visitor classes.  It is no longer necessary to ake a virtue of that necessity ( dare we now say, 'limitation' ?)

Many things are improved in Seaside 3.0 so that overall flipping from HTML markup to Curl goes well in the details - especially in a reduced need to subclass where closed tags happen to be identical across HTML and Curl.

It was amusing to me this time to add crlf so as to get better formatted Curl markup to inspect using the Curl source inspector - and spc to put spaces into the markup layout itself (Curl ignores whitespace the same an HTML client.)

The one concession was to use txt: to dump plain text - but super was not enough to preserve a Curl text: tag - for that I had to look at the runtime class so blocks go to text: and strings go to the canvas encoder for printing.

Curl 'attributes' (properties and options) are laid out the same as Seaside HtmlAttributes so anyone who can layout HTML for Seaside can layout Curl while remaining on 'the gentle slope' of the Curl language when used for declarative web content markup.

It still may be that Aida will be a better home for Curl poetry markup on a Pharo Smalltalk web server.