Epilogue
Chapter 17
#Epilogue: the margin you have been using
You may have written notes in the margins of this book.
To the reader, the margin is simply part of the book. Underneath, it is provided by a small software component that can be included on any Web page.
At first, the notes are stored in your browser. You do not need an account, and the book does not receive everything you write. A private observation stays private.
Browser storage is useful, but it is not much of a home directory. The notes remain tied to one browser on one device. Clear the browser data and they disappear. Open the book somewhere else and the margin is empty.
That is why the margin also lets you connect to Solid.
Once connected, the component can store your notes in your pod. The margin remains here in the book, but the notes no longer live inside the book or belong to the software that displays them.
Open the book on another device and they can still be there. Use the same component on another website and it can work with the same collection. Replace the component and another one can read the notes, provided it understands their shape and you give it permission.
Each passage in the book has a stable address. A note can say which passage it belongs to without becoming part of the book itself.
Solid determines where the note lives, which identity it belongs to, and which applications may read or change it. Linked data describes what the note means: who wrote it, which passage it annotates, when it was written, and whether it replies to another note.
If you have connected the margin to your pod, you were not only reading about this architecture.
You were using it.
#Sharing one note
Private notes are useful, but sometimes a reader writes something that should become part of the wider book.
Perhaps you notice an error. Perhaps you know a better example. Perhaps a chapter reminds you of a paper I missed, or you disagree so precisely that the disagreement improves the argument.
Innovation happens elsewhere.
The notes component lets you share one selected note with the book.
Not the whole notebook. Not every unfinished thought in the margin. One note, deliberately chosen.
That note is sent to the book's inbox. It can be read and curated by me, or by a suitably impressive artificial imitation of me working under close supervision.
Accepted notes can be indexed and made visible to readers who opt in to the shared notes layer.
You own the private note collection. The book owns its curation. Sharing is the act that crosses between them.
A separate tool can manage the inbox. Another can build the index. Another can display approved notes beside the relevant passages. The tool that writes a note does not have to be the tool that publishes it.
#The book follows its own advice
The margin component stays small because it does not have to become a publishing platform, identity provider, storage company and social network before it can be useful.
The book stays a book. It does not need to contain every reader's private notebook.
The book and the component meet at the address of a passage. The component and the pod meet through Solid. A selected note meets the book's editorial process through one deliberate act of sharing.
This is not an example added after the argument. It has been part of the book all along.
Solid is not the inevitable final shape of the Web. The margin component is not the one true way to write notes. The boundaries chosen here may prove awkward, incomplete or simply wrong. Someone elsewhere may find a better shape.
That is allowed.
This book has tried to show why notation matters, why programs grow languages, why assumptions become threads, and why boundaries decide how software can change. Those are not instructions for building the future. They are ways to look at the thing in front of you.
The point is not to follow the rules in this book.
The point is to notice the rules you are already following, understand why they are there, and decide whether they still deserve to exist.
The future is not bound by our rules.