Cheng Lou@_chenglou
I feel compelled to explain the difference here, having used these systems all the way back to almost Corel WordPerfect
The idea of laying out text isn't new (after all, browsers do it). but exposing the programmability makes a huge system-level difference. What you're seeing on the iPad is a _data structure format_, not functions
Hypothetically, if you try to add scriptability to Pages/Word/Google Docs, your complexity explodes, and a picture of giraffe is now kinda turing-complete, and paradoxically but obviously, you gradually lose the ability to lay out such pages, as there are hard trade-offs in performance, serializability, programming model where scripting will take priority
It's also not a surprise that the most interactive platform of all, aka games, somehow drastically clamp on textual capabilities. Many are still baking text textures and using English-only MSDF bc otherwise text complexity takes over and you can't do other cool things anymore (Slug just got open-sourced and is excellent, so hopefully there's movement there).
There's one platform that did start as a document format, then tackled a scripting language on top, and is precisely in the aforementioned complex spot: the web. And it's complex past the point of diminishing return. But my hope is that there's a simple core there, this time an interpreter instead of data format (I wish Alan Kay was on X to chat about this), that we can restart taking seriously
The inspiration that this is possible, comes from another famous platform which evolved from a document format into an interactive one: iOS. If you trace the lineage, you'd find that it started with PostScript (made for printers! Even more static than HTML), and then through centralized stewardship, gently parted ways with it and became a serious and polished platform. The web didn't have that luck, but did win on distribution and openness, so here we are!
