In today’s world where millions of documents are electronic we need a format that is easy recognizable by most devices and operating systems that we use: Mac OS X, Windows, laptop, desktop, Linux, iPhone, eReaders, etc.
From the start, I want to say that the idea, concept, examples and eventually writing the specification, are all mine. So, go ahead, read the lines below and blame me for things that aren’t the way they should be.
The name, Amatl, comes from a form of paper that was manufactured in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. There are more details about it on Wikipedia, of course. My Amatl is based on HTML5 and CSS (2.1 now and 3.0 in the future), two standards that raised the bar with what we can do in terms of layout, embedding fonts, typography, grid and images or blocks positioning. Basically, Amatl is actually a file format that wants to display paper documents inside browsers without any additional tools or software. The format isn’t intended at replacing Adobe’s PDF format or Microsoft’s XPS; it should be used as a complementary format, open and supported by the the entire industry. The closest resembles to it can be EPUB format but they are two completely different concepts.
Compatibility
The good part about this format is that it can be recognizable by old browsers too, I name Firefox 2 and IE7 here. It’s just HTML after all, right?
Differences
There will be no differences when it comes to HTML5 syntax, maintaining the current specification is very important. Still, I recommend not using meta attributes because they will be present in a CSS metadata header.
The most important differences to CSS is introduction of a DPI value and a CSS metadata header. It will be used to write documents at a higher DPI than 96, which is the standard to all web pages on Internet today.
Structure
The Amatl document files should be packed in a ZIP container, having .am extension (like Document1.am) for offline usage and not only. Browser support will be needed for reading HTML files packed inside a ZIP. It can also be served directly from a server with the following structure:
index.html
page-2.html
page-3.html
|-- styles
|-- screen.css
|-- print.css
|-- fonts /* embeddable fonts should be placed here */
|-- languages /* support for multi languages documents */
|-- index-en-us.html
|-- index-en-gb.html
|-- index-ro-ro.html
|-- images
|-- videos
|-- audios
Writing, printing and scaling the documents
It should be very easy to write an Amatl document, like writing a blog post with basic HTML tags: p, a, strong, etc. This is because the HTML5 structure of the format is very easy. You can view the source of this example: Document 1. Printing documents can use a print.css file or the browser should interpret the screen.css (remove styles for body and article tags) and print the pages exactly like they are displayed on the screen.
As I said before, Amatl will supports writing HTML5 with custom DPI through CSS. You can understand how this works by viewing the Warp example from Firefox (or any other browser that supports zooming) at minimum zoom. If browsers will adopt this format, you can view higher quality web documents right in your browser, including higher DPI images and graphics and you can print them right away without needing any other software.
Amatl can also use a single HTML file, that embeds CSS, fonts and images and separates pages accordingly. You can see this in the Document 2 example. This can be dropped from the specifications since I prefer a more standard structure for the format.
License
The format should and will be open since it’s based on open technologies, but it will require a commercial license for software products or web applications for writing, managing or printing the documents. More about this in the future and don’t forget there is amatl.org, a dedicated site for this very project.
Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview which is published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about what web will look like in five years. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.
Google approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, time when you joined Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So basically we don’t need a rank system on Twitter.
Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But, what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and repositon the original tweet instead of last retweet with the number of retweets for a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by dated is more important.
After all that being said, he thinks that will be impossible possible to rank real time information, but it won’t be that clever.
Over the last year or so, I started collecting album covers and squaring each one for better use in media players like iTunes. The purpose of all this was to build my first web app using Django.
But since always dreams don’t manage to become reality, I decided to make this small collection public. There are over 200 covers right now and sorted by the artist name. I have one small request, if you like Dropbox please use this link to register for an account; it gives both of us 250 MB extra space.
My favourite covers, and albums, are Sneaky Sound System’s—an Australian & electronic band—because of clever use of patterns and typography.
After all that being said, he will keep on listening “Dirge” by life Death in Vegas.
I no longer use Twitter. It seems that I won’t announce earthquakes when they’ll happen again. I removed all the contacts from Flickr, I wanted to keep some, but I didn’t want to discriminate. I will keep using their service. I did the same for the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, connections are more and more worthless online. I want to consume web and participate in conversations in a different way, in a way that doesn’t put me in center of action (attention) or at least I shouldn’t be aware of that. Well, that’s because I’m not that kind of person.
I’m a person that cares about every little detail, pixel you might say, and when the effect of abundance makes its appearance, you want to go back to basics for new start. The problem with technology and with web applications is that they are changing too fast. Yesterday you singed up for a service that you enjoyed and tomorrow that thing is completely different. Why doesn’t anybody cares about when I joined their web application (software) and provide me the very same experience? I’ll do like that. For example if Textpattern will change the user experience in the next version I won’t make the switch, because for me usability is what I’m getting used to.
The First Idea
You now may ask: how the heck this guy sees the future of online contacts? Well, a while ago I had a very interesting idea and it sounded like: @lucianmarin needs (or wants to make) a site that bookmarks people and their online accounts (Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) including latest activity. What I wanted to say is that we need a piece of software that facilitates not only the new way of communication (you fill a profile and I subscribe to it) nor the old way (I fill a profile for you in my address book), but actually a mutual connection where both you and me fill a “profile”. I’m calling this people bookmarking.
HP is doing the same old thing one more time with its mobile social network. My idea works different, let’s say you are Leo Laporte and you just spoke with Mike Arrington. After that you can fill in his profile a comment line “What a jerk, I will never spoke with him again” (it was for real). Mike Arrington can check what others said about him and founds the line. The beautiful part about this is that Leo Laporte will keep this in his web application data, and Mike will see it only when they are linked together. So basically, no link, no fun and no public embarrassment for neither of them.
The Second Idea
Oh man, this should be much more fun. I bet everyone knows about blogroll, that’s what makes your blog a little bit more “social”. Since the beginning of EVNO authors where listed different, they had a picture, their name and a status. That’s pretty static, you might say. But what if this was interactive? Like a distributed social network where everyone can hook up, if they have a site (blog) or they are already on a social network.
By the way, I got a new phone, it’s a dumb phone, but it has 1GB internal memory with microSD option and a very nice music player. I liked Opera Mini on Sony Ericsson K8OOi (this 3 years old phone has a better camera than the new iPhone 3GS; I had to say it); and I hope it will stay the same beautiful piece of software in the future.
After all that being said, he admits that this is a protest against social media stupidity abundance.