mind can has mountains

I’ve been trying to compare the existing features of Alexandria with the currently implemented and planned features of Palatina. Rather than muck about with formatting tables in a LibreOffice document, or try to make do with a spreadsheet (and no formatting), I decided I could make a very simple text file format and generate a feature matrix in HTML from that. I wrote this Feature Matrix Generator script in Ruby while hashing out the text format; proper prototyping. The results are quite pleasing (admittedly, that’s largely due to some fancy CSS, but having embedded Markdown makes the whole thing rather easy and useful to read through). The script requires the kramdown Ruby gem.

I’ve been thinking for a while that what I really want to do with Alexandria is experiment wildly. I want to see what kind of database might work best. I’d like to check out the possibility of using RDF-triples to describe arbitrary properties of books. I want to redesign the core domain from the ground up to that the program supports a deep domain model. And to do that, I think I need to depart from ordinary Alexandria development for a while.

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