IDE Collaborative Cycle

There are three aspects to Editing Information as Text. First is the raw text, second is the interpreter, and third is the editor.

The designers of Markdown included features that make raw documents easier to read and write without affecting the generated HTML. A single line break is allowed in Markdown without breaking paragraphs on a generated website. This allows markdown documents (which are really just raw text files) to have line breaks incidental to the type setting of an exported website.

Single line breaks are an example of [[Ephemeral Information]]—state which only serves a fleeting utility. A scroll bar on a web form is another example. My scroll position does not have any meaning once the form is submitted; it only existed to help me navigate the form elements. Similarly, single line breaks in Markdown lose meaning once the document is converted to a web page, but they help during the process of editing the document.

Interpreters then derive meaning which would be hard and unnecessary to maintain in raw text. For example, ordered lists, which are allowed to use any number in raw text, receive proper numbers derived from the actual relative position of items.

Editors are an interactive interpreter, which can help save derived meaning back to files so that the raw files are more legible than would be possible to maintain by hand. An editor can update the numbers in the raw file to match the interpreted order, or they can perform line breaking and word splitting.

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