reactive articles
The introduction of the HTML5 canvas means that graphics can easily be drawn on the page with pixel perfect accuracy. The canvas element also brings to the book a ot of other interesting dynamics since Javascript can interact with it and manipulate it in seemingly endless ways.
One interesting Javascript library I have found which came my way via Victor Diaz, who has himself done a lot of very interesting things, is Tangle by Bret Victor.
http://worrydream.com/#!/Tangle
Bret calls Tangle a library for coding Reactive Documents and I like this idea very much. He has a good explanation of the philosophy behind it in his own words:
http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/
I don’ t think I can add much yet to what he says already. What I do find interesting is one of his lasts question in the above article.
I released Tangle, the JavaScript library behind Ten Brighter Ideas and the examples above. It’s a nice bootstrapping step, but far from the goal of an authoring tool. What might such a tool look like?
Its a very interesting question. We might also combine this idea and question with other interesting projects online that bring in dynamic authoring functionality. For an example the Mercury Editor is an important step in this direction with its dynamic snippets.
Whats cool about all of this is that all of the interesting stuff, explorations and implementations are Open Source. The benefits of Open Source in this world is really starting to pay off and I think the world of book production is going to blossom in this area while closed source projects get left behind.