Purple Numbers

A practice in the Open Hyperdocument System of making all documents Paragraph Addressable by inserting A-NAMEs at that level.

Chris Dent:BlogTweaks describes Chris' hacks to implement Purple Numbers and Transclusion in a WebLog and a Wiki (EMail to come?)

• update: see GranularAddressability https://tank.peermore.com/tanks/tank-notes/GranularAddressability

Chris Dent:PurpleNetwork describes A collection of documents and resources which all use the same source for Purple Numbers. Such a collection can transclude among itself, even if the documents are not of the same type.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Numbers

Eugene Eric Kim essay from 2001.

http://eekim.com/software/purple/

Nov'2012: Chris Dent [re-states](http://cdent.tiddlyspace.com/bags/cdent_public/tiddlers/Purple%20Numbers%20in%20Tiddly Web) his goal/context, esp in terms of Tiddly Space: This synthesis use case is really the key to the entire model. It implies a group of active writers and readers who are frequently updating their stuff in response to flow of information around them. This need is also probably why purple universe never gets legs outside of small committed groups: Active writers and readers are rare. (Active Reading, Sense Making)

• *If I could work out a way to make an editor that actually work for this, my version of purple in Tiddly Web would work something like this:
  • When initially creating content it is broken down into tiddlers with titles that are NIDs.
  • A "document" is a composition of those tiddlers. (composable)
  • Markup of some kind would be used to reuse content when editing other compositions.
  • Presentation would recompose the disparate tiddlers and plop pilcrows on the view.* (Transclusion, Wiki And Outlining)

Need to get down some thoughts on Purple Numbers and Transclusion (as it inches toward a Node Web vision)...

• if you're just going after granular addressability, then node ids (nid-s) can be pretty much anything, as long as they're unique within the document

  • but common User Story is refactoring a document, so a paragraph/node could move to a totally different page/document. So code has to be at least domain-unique. Might as well go all the way to to UUID?

• nodes (Information Block-s) get identified with a tag like '{nid351}'

• multiple media/channels (a wiki, an Email List) can share a Purple Numbers server which hands out node ids.

• do we need a URI-authority like Tim Bray to give some input? (should a nid be thought of as a URI? should its containing document have some 'Base Nid Host' tag or something to identify its purple-source?)

• .....