- Sep 2024
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www.matthewsiu.com www.matthewsiu.com
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Latticework’s portal-based marginalia allow commentary to be created and viewed from either “side” of a snippet link, interchangeably. Snippet links can be serialized to standard URLs in standard Markdown plaintext. (Modern systems only support links to blocks, not arbitrary text ranges. For block links, Obsidian uses non-standard anchors; others use proprietary database formats.) Snippet links can be quickly created (either from source or at the destination) using key commands. Transcluded snippets can be collapsed to increase density, and re-expanded when needed. Pane-based navigation allows users to preview and visit links while maintaining a consistent view of the linking pane.
5 reasons L's bidirectionality is different to pkm tools / Xanadu. The first two are most key imo: they can be initiated from both sides of a link, and result in the same thing. (e.g. diff from [[Webmention 20200926203019]], and two the links are standard URLs (in standard Markdown), whereas Roam / Notion abstract them away in a db, moving outside their role as viewer, and Obs maintains its viewer role, but adds things to the notes not obviously interpretable outside of it.
I'd add that the linked snippets are a different unit of linking from what Obs et al support. Much closer to the granularity where the knowledge work is done. Surprisal I rarely find in a paragraph, mostly in part of a sentence. Questions latch onto a single word sometimes.
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Snippet links are a kind of hypertext, and embedded snippet links are a kind of transclusion. Originally proposed by Ted Nelson as part of his Xanadu system, transclusions present part of one document within another, while maintaining bi-directional links for navigation and orientatio
Bidirectionality here explicitly tied to Ted Nelson's Xanadu. Call block transclusion in pkm tool transclusion "primitives" which sound like a right charcterisation. Say Latticework differs from both
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You’ll get the same result no matter which direction you go—a highlight in the source document and a snippet link in the working document. Conceptually, highlighting doesn’t actually modify the source document. Highlights are a dynamic style applied to all the snippets linked in your working document. So if you delete a snippet link, the corresponding highlight will disappear, too
Bi-directionality is a key feature in Latticework, which is great. At the same time, on the source end it is also ephemeral. If your remove a linked snippet from the sensemaking document, the highlight, which is just a styling element, gets removed from the source. The source is not modified to produce the highlight. (Any permanent link to source should be made consciously, which is right) Bidirectionality, other than linking seems to me a key affordance in #pkm, something that not now exists in either my annotations / reading / processing flows. #openvraag: where in my workflows would bidirectional trace leaving be useful.
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