If you came to the “low-down” on eWriter from Kirby Urner’s 4D Solutions web, you came from a page that, in the locator field, has webdesign.html. To get there, I clicked on Website Design, an activity that 4D Solutions is sometimes engaged in, ...but, I brooded over that web design staring back at me from my browser. That’s what an ewriter (the human one) is doing while writing (wrighting) e’s (his or her) web (and web-formed) scrolls. The linear flow weaving and encompassing and creating the hyperlinear, variconceptual “thrown beyond”...

Writing “web design’d” eText...

One handful of dirt at a time
My mountains slide into my valleys
Overloading the rock mantle.

Some hidden fault yields
Some deep part slides against another
And the outflying waves throw you back.

This is my flesh I speak.

I wrote those lines more than three decades ago to serve as an “introductory remark” attached to a long poem about a five year experience that “rebuilt me from the ground up” as I lived the experience. The “how” of the rebuilding is implied, ...which is why I wanted these lines here.

I said on the main low-down page, that a number of conceptual or understanding (under-stand, sub-stance, etc.) shifts were going to change us as readers and writers. Or “rebuild us from the ground up” by changing the very ground, the earthy stuff Adam is sculpted from. I focused on an expanded sense of what punctuating text involves. That’s the sense that underlies my building up of the layered textwriter into an htmlwriter and an xmlwriter.

But in talking about work that’s going to be on the Internet web, the world-wide web, design becomes a focus point. And an implied difference between a writer and a designer, who is viewed as a spread out “layout designer. Text is separated out from “other” materials, and is considered in blocks, the what’s said and meaning only entering in a high level, abstract sense affecting the over-all design.

This conception is one reason that we talk about web “pages” and worry about things like multiple columns, compositional balance, and, in general, magazine layout. Web pages are just digitized paper pages in this view. The web is just a huge, loose leaf .pdf file (a thought that Adobe’s marketers must love).

No pages pages exist. The idea of pages comes not just from paper, but from cut paper, paper that’s cut to a size so stacks of pages (two to a piece of paper) can be “bound” together in one way or another. What we have on the web isn’t a new sort of page at all. It’s a new sort of scroll.

Does switching metaphors make a difference — or shift anything in your or my innards? Well, it makes a difference when we get to that “a new sort of....” Physical scrolls are usually wrapped around a spindle with another one that you can pull down or wrap the scroll onto. And the cut page (or hide) phenomenon enters in. You can make a scroll to any width, but once made that’s the width it is. Our new sort of scroll isn’t like that. In fact, a reader who has acquired, from reading magazine page columns, a comfortable column width and type size can set the browser’s type size and, then, grab the right-hand edge of the browser and adjust the width of the scroll. That might play hell with a scroll that’s emulating a magazine page. Or one that’s emulating a tagged wall in the inner city. But, ...a half dozen uses of the awareness even for those types of scrolls jump to mind.

Back up to where you were thinking of a new sort of page. Even here, you can see the shifting sands and dunes of the cyberscape. The physical page was a thing, the new one is ...well, a web.

In the physical page, the binding of elements is just the pressing into sheets of the paper pulp. The elements aren’t really part of the page, but impressed up on it. Now, the elements, the content, are parts of what exists in the moment as a page (among the pixels). The binding is only linking, the sequential appending within growing files and the specific linking initiated in the punctuating tags. So, even if we keep old metaphors, they change and we shift, down in our innards, with them.

Einsteinian design (seeing from a light beam's edge)!

A writer adds onto a moving front edge of a snaking outward mental light beam, catching inner thinking and imagining into language, into a written notation. Maybe we get an easier to understand image if we think of Mozart writing down a symphony forming in his awareness so rapidly he thought it was, what with cross-references, present in awareness “all at once.” And he not only sets it out at the front edge, but, he can, perhaps did, have more than one front edge on different sheets or in spaces left for filling in. Give him an eWriter that handled musical notes, chords, figures, parallel lines, he could go back and open up front edges ...anywhere. The thing is, it’s linear and hyperlinear. There’s no “page layout.”

For a language writer, an English writer like myself, and a poet, what designers would call “layout” does enter in ...for the literate who’ve lived from near birth with pages. We write, always, for columns without knowing it. At first there’s only the book page single column and, maybe, for the unpublished, the typewriter paper one column. But, later, knowing the publication(s) of what is flowing out onto the paper or screen, the writer or ewriter ...adjusts paragraph content that will manifest as paragraph length in columns. I’m a literate poet, and poets sang long before literacy entered their workshops, so I see how my poems are going to fall on the page, make the details of that falling match how the songs and talkings fall on my voice. I’ve two sorts of punctuation that I “counterpoint” among other uses. The familiar marks we all know and ...what’s mostly white space. Indents, skipped spaces within the line, single or multiple skipped lines, and “shingled” indents that a series of lines (phrases) fall through, only to have partial or complete fall backs toward the margin come after.

Then, in straight composition paper paragraphs, there is the try to catch the spirit of such “moves.” Just the ordinary marks and the words. Then, there’s the more advanced punctuation, some of which can be used in poems and some of which can’t. Italics is the first sort, and hyphenation is the second. Of course even in straight prose you can’t control hyphenation unless you can control where lines will break in the columns. But, potentially, it is a mark....

Everything in eWriter is cast in forms that let the ewriter using it “rope in” everything e (he or she) needs to build shaped text or pages or scrolls. Pictures, sounds, movies. Leaving Mozart with his quill and ink, I’ll move to describing the difference between TV and radio drama. You’d think TV drama would exercise human imagination, but you’d be wrong. It only feeds imagination and turns off the productive activity. Of course, you can imagine the scenes you’ve seen. But that’s not the useful sort of imagining. Radio drama is one-dimensional, linear. Just the flow of sound. Humans mostly organize all input around the visual. Sitting at my old roll-top oak dsk in the front room of a small cottage on Spruce street at the base of the Berkeley (California) hills, I hear a squealling sound. Or that’s what an oscilloscope might call it, given speech. What I hear is a sound I understand coming from the intersection one house (a large one) away. It’s the squeal of tires as a medium heavy car takes a turn, heading down grade, at a fairly high speed (without stopping for the sign) and, then, guns it out of the turn. I even “see” it ...in imagination’s eyes, some details blurry, some less blurry than they should be ...as I pump knowing into sensing. The pumping yields almost the whole pseudo-perception. But we do plenty in what we think of as flat, objective perception, too. Anyway, while listening to radio dramas as a kid (early thirties [the years, not me]), I was being trained to do this at the level of producing witnessed stories.

Some decades later, in the sixties, I’m writing poems using that white-space punctuation, fingers moving on the keys, on a manual until about 1967 when I had a Selectric for a couple years, and pushing those phrases (the elemenets of poetry) around to visually “echo” the pushing I did with my lungs and larynx at a “reading.” And I started writing manuscript as “engine” script. I was starting a little older than most did, and just as the little magazine and small press movement was hitting a second wave and spreading over the globe. I published from the beginning. Publishers had all sorts of mimeo machines, second half offset presses, and whatever versions of “typesetting.” So, as a reader from age four, I wrote in itlics, white space punctuation, and everything else that’d help me “put English on the ball” (or “...word”). I was seeing those later “interface” publications, pushing whatever tags onto my “engine” manuscript that would work. Underlining and a margin sign for italics. I hated that. Underlining created a shout, not a second voice.

And, yeah, I wrote for columns, planning where a poem would break at a column end, how the two columns’ shapes would interact. In the coming millennium, in your ewriting, ...you will do these things without ever tryin’ your hand at a poem. You might have two scrolls side by side (frames). Or you might have two columns in a scroll (tables). You can do anything the layout artist can do ...and it’s yours to do. What is important to know isn’t a set of rules, but just what the context is, how a reader will interact with you to control e’s experience. You might write magazine pages. Keep in mind, though, that you write them, and that is a different thing than what’s done in a magazine’s art department.

EWriter has a two part XML menu. The bottom part is basic XML punctuation, used mainly for writing DTDs, but by document writers, too, at least in the prologue and sometimes deeper into the document (processing instructions). At the very top is something called The Changer which affects how hot keys and even menu items work. Between the two is “eXtending markup” while the lower section is “eXtensible” markup. HTML beyond itself emulating XML-like tricks.

There’s an item on this menu named “n x m Table Frame.” Click the item, enter the numbers of rows and cells in two sequential pop-up input boxes ...and a table frame is laid down the page from where your cursor was. As it ends, your cursor is at the end ...and you go on typing. You return later to populate your table with entries. Sure, you’ll flesh it out with attributes, too, in some final “editing.” After every <TR>, <TH>, and <TD> there is a comment giving the row or cell (in the row) number. Use it once or twice and you’ll appreciate how cumbersome the table editors in Winword or PageMaker are. This table is very easy to write into.

You can write your table with the cells in a row side by side in the engine page, since that is how they will be in the interface pages. But, you lose the value of writing’s linearity. The table is easiest to read if cells are side by side in their rows. It’s easiest to write if they run down the page. In this frame, you run up and down the page, at the margin, reading numbers to find the slot to write into. Beats visual table-making hands down. But, you have both simultaneously. When you started your session with the document, you went to Tools/Browsers and got the document into the browser. Now, you Alt+Tab between eWriter and the browser and see both pages together. You can tile the two if you have enough screen area (1024 x 768, say) or if you work in somewhat skinny scrolls. You can write on a page sized eWriter but show in a skinny Navigator or Explorer. Remember, everything’s shifting ...subtly. What you are doing, writing down that stack of cells, is writing into a “layout” frame, just as you are writing into a “punctuation frame” when you use Ctrl+( to get the tags that enclose your parenthetical comment right there in thrown beyond form. Call it hyperlinearity. Or, ...just call it writing. Maybe “split stream” writing, if you need to be a little bit fancy (or require mnemonics).